Improving Twitter Conversations sent from @PinballArcade

I've noticed that if you subscribe to TPA's twitter account, you will generally have to go to Facebook to read the full post.

This resharing FB posts practice is *really* frustrating. The message reshared from Facebook is cut, and usually doesn't give a succinct enough summary about what the message is. And you have to brave Facebook to read the update.

For example, the latest twitter update looks like this:

Now that the holidays are over, production has starterd returning to normal. We have spent the last few weeks... fb.me/2BhMNoEM0

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with the full FB summary as follows:

Now that the holidays are over, production has starterd returning to normal. We have spent the last few weeks making sure everyone that was owed a TZ or TNG table on an osx, ios, or android device recieved it, along with anything else owed on those platforms. We acknowledge that there were missteps and errors along the way and that the system itself was confusing. We are still cleaning up here, and are working to put that past us, and get 2013 off on the right foot. If you are still owed TZ, TNG, a pro pack, or whatnot, from us for backing the kickstarter, please email support@farsightstudios.com and we will take care of you asap. We are also going to release the TNG ball skin with this next pack for mobile.

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So here's a suggestion, (which I did send to the twitter account in multi-part messages but received no response about).

For all updates to all social media networks, create the main message you want to communicate on an official Farsight blog. Tailor a summary suitable for each social network, and then add the link to the message.

This will give twitter followers the info they prefer to see. Terse, structured, digestible summaries they can use to work out whether they want to read the blog post or just ignore it.

A twitter summary for the above tweet could be written like so:

Finalizing outstanding Kickstarter fulfulments, and an update on TNG ball skins. <link to blog>

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Twitter is Twitter. Facebook is Facebook. And never the twain shall meet, even if you do have the option to push the same comment between both.

While it may be easier, It's just not "doing it right" from a social media perspective.

I hope this information is not perceived as a rant, but as constructive criticism with a view to improving communication for all your fans.

Cheers

@jaredmorgs

francis247uk said:

Definitely agree with the slight annoyance of tweets linking to Facebook posts, other people I follow do this and it's rather frustrating.


Not so sure about the blog idea, only because the monthly newsletter seems to include all the relevant information of the past months activities so social media could probably just link to that.

Could the newsletter not just be published on TPA's website, that's definitely in need of an overhaul and if that could be optimised in Google to come up when people search for keywords relating to digital pinball, it may help drive traffic to Farsight and TPA website and hopefully generate some more sales and general buzz about TPA, appreciate that's a bit off topic though, just an idea.

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That's a good suggestion about a site revamp.

I hope Rob eventually reads this thread.

They could combine the newsletters and the blog idea into one when/if they revamp the site so that there is an archive of changes, release dates etc.

Another thing that might be nice is a change log for each new version.

francis247uk said:

"Another thing that might be nice is a change log for each new version"

Great idea, even if it just showed the major changes if including the smaller ones was too time consuming

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I'm just going to assume this is never going to happen. So many posts asking for a change log going back to the first bug fixes and nothing. FS is obviously not interested in keeping us informed to that degree.

Bumping this thread so someone at Farsight can take note and implement the system. I would say it would take a social media team person about 1 day to get this system up and running.

It would certainly take me about that long. Wordpress and Blogger make it easy to do this type of thing, including implementing quite nice theming (which could be a medium to long term goal for the team).

The thread about receiving a credit for purchased tables could be the inaugural post for this new service.

My rates are pretty reasonable if Farsight don't have time to set this up initially.