Twitter best practice guidelines

How to tweet:

#1 - More tweets are better than less tweets: when in doubt, it’s worth posting replies or RTs of cool projects, people or interesting news. It’s even ok to repeat yourself, because....

#2 - Very few people encounter your tweets by reading through your timeline. Most will only see a tweet that happens to be surfaced in their timeline. Don’t be afraid of tweeting the same content multiple times, because most people will only see it once, especially since time zones vary so much. Tweet something in the morning, and then tweet it again the same evening to catch a different audience with the same content.

#3 - Tweets with pictures do better than tweets without pictures. Tweets with good pictures do even better. Tweets with good gifs do even, even better.

#4 - That means it’s worth planning ahead for eye-catching assets, and making sure those assets are configured for Twitter. See below for

Twitter Aspect Ratios⁠

for different tweet asset resolutions and ratios.

#5 - Threads usually perform well. Twitter summarizes long threads by showing the first, second and last tweet in the thread, so if you want to make sure all your information is seen, 3-tweet-threads are optimal.

#6 - Construct tweets that encourage replies or participation: ask questions (’what’s the best UEFN hack you learned this week?’ etc), offer prizes, use polls. Twitter works best when it isn’t about broadcasting (”here is a thing we did”), but is more about starting conversations (”what’s the best #creative2.0 game you played this week?”)

#7 - Decide on a tone of voice and keep it consistent. Will you tweet as ‘we’ (”We’re super excited to announce that @coolcreator is joining the Mondrian team!”) or keep things more formal (”Mondrian is excited to announce the dates for next year’s MCA.”) Do you talk about things that aren’t related to the metaverse? (’We’ve got that #fridayfeeling - who’s planning to see a movie this weekend?’).

#8 - Make a private, test Twitter account, and post draft tweets to it first before you publish them. Are the images showing up right? How does it look on mobile vs browser vs other platforms? Are the line breaks weird? Did all the links, tags and @’s work correctly?

#9 - Decide how active the account will be in responding to comments or questions from the community. What should happen if someone replies to a Mondrian tweet and says ‘I played one of your games and it sucked ass.’? Consider agreeing some basic principles, e.g. - everyone who replies to a Mondrian tweet should get some kind of response within 24 hours (e.g. a Like, a reply, or a request to DM if there’s a problem to be solved. Speaking of which: #10 - Decide a DM policy. Are Mondrians DM’s open? Who replies to them? Are there expectations around whether or not all DMs get a reply and if so how fast? (a common policy would be to reply to all DMs within one working day, but to often use cut-and-paste pre-canned replies).

#11 - Set up a shared folder (google drive or similar) for assets used for tweets, so it’s easy to get approval on them and use them for future tweets.

What to tweet:

#1 - Build a calendar like this

basic twitter calendar⁠

to plan tweets, identify needed assets, and get sign-off.

#2 - Use the calendar to identify upcoming events or announcements from Mondrian that you want to plan content around. When are new games releasing? Are there cool new hires or collaborations to announce? Will Mondrian be appearing at any events? Are there playtests or showcases planned on Discord? These should all be listed in the Twitter calendar.

#3 - Decide on a basic cadence - what are the expectations for how often the account should tweet? Three times a day, 5 days a week (Twitter is quieter on weekends) is a good starting assumption.

#4 - Build a list of ‘evergreen’ tweet types - these are repeatable ideas for tweets that can be used over and over. Each week, you can probably fill 75%+ of your required content from ‘evergreen’ tweet ideas - e.g. ‘recent UFEN news’ or ‘cool new project’.

#5 - Aim to complete the calendar around 10 days ahead of posting time (e.g. by Wednesday, have draft tweets and assets ready for all of the following week’s tweets). These can then be submitted for sign-off with a ~48 hour turn around, which will leave another ~48 hours to amend or adjust anything that isn’t right.

#6 - Some tweets can’t be planned ahead, because they’ll be about new announcements or content from other Twitter accounts. That’s OK - leave space in the calendar for responsive tweets, and agree ahead of time that these will go out without requiring approval.

#8 - Once everyone is happy with how the Twitter is running, consider dialing back the need for sign-off and approval

#9 - While you’re building the Twitter calendar for Mondrian events and announcements, also add in general calendar content - Halloween, Christmas, sports events, etc. How can you use these events to generate content and drive conversation?

Twitter Aspect Ratios