How to find Quality Hashtags to expand Your Reach?

Today I was wondering what hashtags people on twitter use and which hashtags have a good chance to create engagement (either retweets, faves or replies). Out of curiousity, I conducted a short study about this topic.

Using the service social bearing I took a closer look how different game development and gaming related hashtags performed. The hashtags I examined were #gamedev, #indiedev, #gamersunite, #gaming, #indiegames and #indiegame.

The sample sizes here are small and I had to pep up the data manually. Despite of the sample size, the results speak volumes.



Reach per minute: How many unique users are reached per minute on average.
Impressions per minute: How many impressions/views are given per minute on average. Includes combined followers and multiple views by the same users.
RTs/min: How much is retweeted per minute on average.
Faves/min: How much is faved/liked per minute on average.
Replies/min: How many replies are received per minute on average.

To visualize the data better, I created some charts here.

It looks like the #gamedev and #gaming hashtags are great to reach a lot of people, but if you want to connect to the community to keep in touch, ask questions or exchange ideas, #indiedev, #indiegame and #GamersUnite may be a better choice. Completely irrelevant seems the #indiegames hashtag here.

Is the data coherent with practice?

Now I was curious whether this holds any truth, so I looked at the data using twitter analytics. Before this, I was wondering how to make my game, CamoTactics, more fun and interesting and tweeted about it.

Take a look at this tweet. I was trying to ping on devs with this one.

What do you think makes a shooting game special and worth to play? #gamedev #indiedev

— Bettina Schuller (@b5cully) 6. Mai 2016

Now compare with the same tweet, where I used different hashtags, trying to approach gamers.

#indiedev Needs help from #gamers: What do you think makes a shooting game special and worth to play? #gaming #gamersunite

— Bettina Schuller (@b5cully) 6. Mai 2016

Interestingly enough, the results of my small study were somewhat similar to what actually happens.

At the time I'm writing this, the first tweet had more retweets, but 100% of them were by bots. It got a few favs from real accounts with an engagement rate of 2,3%. Only one real person replied to this.
The second tweet is more interesting. Some of my followers jumped into the conversation, including someone who I've never seen around. There was only one retweet, but four replies. The engagement rate of this one is 2,8%.

The second tweet actually made people engage with me. This is interesting, because according to the social bearing data, since #gamersunite may have less reach, but generated more replies. This could have many reasons and the fact I posted on that hashtag doesn't necessarily needs to be one of them.

More social experiments are to come soon! In the meantime, you are most welcome to download a demo build of my game, CamoTactics, here.