10 tips for hanging with the Tweet Fleet
Apart from blogging and maybe YouTube, Twitter might be perhaps the most popular form of social media among EVE players. Setting it up doesn’t take any special skills or knowledge, and we’ve formed a small and incredibly supportive community we affectionately call the “Tweet Fleet”. We egg each other on, help spread the word about what everyone else has going, discuss and debate, and generally provide the right sort of online friends and community.
I thought I’d share with you a few ideas from my years using Twitter, and I hope more of you who already participate in our thriving, growing group will join in with your own ideas in the comments. And of course, please follow me on @casiella and send me an @-reply to let me know!
- Create an account specifically for EVE-related tweeting. Twitter doesn’t require you to only use one account, and many clients like Tweetdeck (my personal favorite) explicitly support the use of multiple accounts. So if you use Twitter for personal or professional purposes, just create another account for EVE. You will also avoid annoying your non-EVE playing friends with constant discussions of killmails, ISK, and patches…
- Use your EVE avatar for your profile picture. This immediately creates an obvious connection to the game, letting anyone you follow know that you’re not a spammer.
- Set up your Twitter profile. Once you’ve created your account, choose a design or, better yet, upload your own background picture. Fill out the fields, especially the “bio” section” and maybe a URL if you have one. Don’t just use your Twitter profile as your URL, though, because that sort of defeats the purpose. If you don’t have any other EVE-related profile anywhere, at least use your EVE Search URL, like mine (except with your own character name, naturally).
- Tweet about EVE. By this, I mean not to tweet regularly about non-EVE stuff. Not to say you should never mention RL, but the bulk of your tweets should revolve around EVE in some way. And don’t just tweet your blog posts, though nobody will mind if you do this as part of general participation. Twitter is about conversations, not broadcasts.
Follow the Tweet Fleet. The easiest way to do this is to follow @00sage00/tweetfleet using your preferred Twitter client or at the link I just provided. He runs the most popular EVE-related list on Twitter, though far from the only one, so this will automatically get you following the bulk of EVE-focused Twittereans. Right now, he has 225 people on the list, and you’ll also get @ccpgames and other CCP Twitter accounts this way.- Get on the Tweet Fleet list. Just send an @-reply to @00sage00 and ask him to add you to the list. Assuming you’ve sent a few game-related tweets and don’t look like a spammer, he’s pretty easy-going about it.
- Use the #tweetfleet hashtag. At the end of some of your game-related tweets, particularly those you’d like to get some sort of response, just add “#tweetfleet” and perhaps “#eveonline”. (A hashtag is just a way of marking a tweet for a particular topic.) Lots of folks have a running search in their Twitter client for those hashtags and you’ll get lots of new conversations that way. In fact, be sure to keep a search for the #tweetfleet hashtag yourself for discussion specifically thrown out there for the community.
- Respond to the “questions of the day.” Occasionally, somebody will send a tweet with “QOTD” and the #tweetfleet hashtag. This means “question of the day”, and so you should respond and generally join in the chatter. Be sure to include the hashtag yourself!
- Participate in Follow Friday. Every Friday, you’ll see a bunch of tweets tagged “#followfriday” or maybe just “#ff”. This is just a way of people recommending other folks you might want to follow. Look in particular for tweets also tagged “#tweetfleet”, of course. And share the love: if you found somebody particularly interesting or worthy of attention, throw it out yourself. They’ll notice it in their mentions/replies, and probably reply back to you, too. It’s a great way of establishing a little deeper connection.
- Retweet other people if they say something cool. You might just want to help get the word out about an announcement. Or maybe you really liked something somebody just said. A retweet is sort of like a QFE on forums. You can either do it old-school (copy the tweet into a new message, then preface it with “RT @username”), or new-school which just reshares the tweet to your followers with a special bit that shows who retweeted it. Either way, nearly all up-to-date Twitter clients support this, sometimes with one click.
Obviously, you shouldn’t consider any of this some sort of “requirement”, and you can do lots of other things to increase your participation and maybe even reputation. But the more of this you follow, the more conversations and interactions you’ll have!
And, by the by, what about you existing Tweetfleeters? Any additional thoughts or suggestions?
