Social Media Activity

In accordance with this thread (Release 0.4.0 Thread), let’s discuss some ideas for how we could improve our social media presence and some updates we could post to them in the near future.

Main questions to address:

  • What improvements can we make to our social media presence?
  • Are there any social media outlets we are neglecting?
  • What are some updates we can post to social media in the next few weeks/months?

Last I checked our twitter the last message was about our last release. We need to post on twitter more. For example whenever some small new feature is done or something else that can be made into a screenshot (fixes/new stuff that can’t be shown shouldn’t be used to flood our twitter feed).

Right now the now-working suicide button should be screenshotted and posted on twitter. And maybe all the twitter posts could be also posted on facebook. That way we look active on our social medias and not dead.

Yeah definitely, that’s a good idea. Is there a way we can automate an update to one social media to apply to a bunch of them?

Not sure how easy it is but there are probably bots that can post the same update to multiple places, but that might need some programming work to set it up, which of course would be programming that’s not going into thrive. And as the programming is (I think) the worst bottleneck currently, it’s probably not worth it to spend time on such a bot.

Let’s throw that idea onto the backburner for now then, we can stick to a manual updating schedule for the time being.

Are there any social media outlets other than Facebook and Twitter that we have that are worth keeping active?

Also, (I think YouTube counts as social media) there was an idea a few months back to do a bit more on YouTube, like some demos maybe programmer tutorials, stuff like that.

Facebook and Twitter should be quite easy to keep active. If there any interesting dev discussions or developments going on we can link that, if not there’s usually some community thing going on we can link too. Failing that, we can always make a thread on the community forum and link that to generate fan-interaction. We just have to remember to update it. I think posting about 3 times a week would be the sweet spot.

In addition to those we should keep posting the dev blogs on indiedb.

I think even once a week is fine for now since we’re transitioning into regular updates and it might get overwhelming if you’re not used to 3 a week, but if your fine with that by all means go ahead.

Yeah if possible I think we should try to post more to youtube past just trailers.

As pointed out here the Steam group has gone near-silent. I haven’t been getting notifications for it and assume others haven’t, so I don’t really see a way to make it more active without giving it more attention that it deserves.

Our subreddit has gone quiet recently too. We could post updates like we do for Twitter/Facebook there too. As we found in the various surveys, a lot of people use the website, the subreddit and nothing else, so we’re missing out on a massive audience if we neglect it.

@Seregon says he’ll have more time to work on Thrive come October, and I apologise to him for mentioning it again, but I really think a video (whether casual or formal) outlining the CPA system, posted to our YouTube channel, is a great idea. We could do the same with other game concepts, like a description of the envisaged final microbe editor accompanied by concept art.

And for me personally, I know once I finally finish the Thrive Main Theme and have the approval, I’ll upload that to the RG channel too. Whether that will happen soon though I have no clue.[quote=“NickTheNick, post:3, topic:380”]
Is there a way we can automate an update to one social media to apply to a bunch of them?
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IFTTT is the best bet. We could write a recipe that posts new Facebook content to Twitter, or vice versa, but not at the same time as this would obviously cause an infinite loop. We could even wire in GitHub and the subreddit directly, although a curated approach with actual humans behind everything is in my opinion a better option.[quote=“stealthstylel, post:6, topic:380”]
Facebook and Twitter should be quite easy to keep active. If there any interesting dev discussions or developments going on we can link that, if not there’s usually some community thing going on we can link too.
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It astounds me how active the Discord server is, and you moderators seem to spend a lot of time managing it. Unfortunately it’s only one outlet that most of our audience will never see, so if you and the other moderators are ok with it I’m proposing that you use some of that time and energy to instead manage our social media stuff. That would mean keeping perfect track of development activity both in public and on Slack, but between you it might be possible.

Yeah I’d agree with this one a lot, I think reddit is one we need to pay a lot more attention to. We should find people who are able to work on that.

Also yeah, those two suggested videos for Youtube sound good for some new content.