Community managers guide

Community Manager header

As a community manager, it is your job to inform the public about all of the latest game and site news. Rather it be through Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media platform, you are tasked with providing accurate and timely news to our community.

Introduction

Why do we communicate?

Just like any other websites, we need to give our users a reason to come back and use our features. Though some will naturaly remember to keep track of their in-game progress, and some other might be very involved in the community through activities, the vast majority of the people who come to our websites will need some sort of reminder to come back. By providing content on social media platforms, which most people use on a daily basis, we ensure that they see any new content that we or the license has, and through the links we share, find their way to our website.

What do we communicate about?

License news
Our own events and created content

Case studies:

School Idol Tomodachi was already popular among the community, but really took off to a whole different level when users were able to get notified of new cards via Twitter. It then became a community of its own with activities, but the majority of our users still come from links in tweets even today.
Stardust Run suffered from lack of news, just like Pokémon GO did. People had no incentive to come back, so the site never really took off. We did consider organizing more events, but the user base never became big enough the justify the effort.

In other words, social media is what keeps our websites and community active.

When do we communicate?

While there are always special exceptions, you will usually announce news whenever you obtain it. When your game's official twitter account posts about the newest event or a Developer finishes a new feature for your site, you should post about it!

How do we communicate?

Old style

Before the age of social media, websites still faced the same need to give users incentives to come back. Techniques to get users back included:

Ads

Seeing a popup about our website when you’re browsing another website definitely reminds you of its existence and may make you come back. However, it has 3 main issues: 1. People don’t like seeing advertisements, so it might give them a negative image of your website and be counter-productive. 2. It costs money, but the return on investement is low. 3. A lot of users use Adblockers, especially among our targets.

Blog articles

Blogs about the license exist: and it includes the ones based on Tumblr. Bigger, more general blogs such as Crunchyroll also regularly post about the license. When approached the right way, reaching to the owners of these blogs to get an article about our website can help. An issue with it is that it’s generally a one-time thing, and blogs will often not accept posting about you too often. It’s a great solution for communication about pre-launch, launch, and big community organized events.

Affiliations

You’ve probably seen before some small banners on the side of your favorite websites. These are affiliations, or partnerships, with other websites. The idea is that when 2 websites have a similar target, it’s mutually interesting for both websites to link to each other.

All 3 techniques work and can still be used today. Though they correspond more to the “external communication” role, please consider talking with the team and implement them.

As an example, School Idol Tomodachi is affiliated with Love Live! Wikia and Otonokizaka forum via banners exchanges, and got a blog article on the official Amimo space.

New style: social media

While in the old times, people would use bookmarks and navigate to their websites through them, coupled with search engines (see also: SEO), most people nowadays simply open their favorite social media platforms and navigate through a large variety of different websites through the posts they see in their timeline. It’s a more passive approach, and that’s why we want to make sure our website is part of the posts they see!

To make sure we appear on our targets’ feed, we can use 2 methods:

Gather followers on our own social pages
Post on external pages

In this guide, we’re only focusing on the first item. See External communication guide for the second item.

See particularities for each below.

Social media platforms

Social media pages should already have been created by Circles manager. If you’re willing to create a new social media page, contact the Circles manager and make sure they sync with the Developer to add the external permissions to the website.

So far, all websites have been using Twitter as their main social media communication platform, but the Manager of each website is ultimately the decision maker regarding which social media platform the websites communicates on.

Social pages can be created on:

Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
Reddit

Twitter

1st time: configuring Tweetdeck

Login to Tweetdeck with your personal account.
Accept the invitation to tweet to the website's Twitter account.
Remove all the columns by default.
Add the following columns:
- Notifications
  
  Filter to only show "Mentions", "Quoted tweets" and "Lists".
- People who talk about us: Search
  
  Search term needs to be a bunch of keywords matching our name, our domain, and any nickname people use to talk about us, separated with "OR". Then at the end, add "AND -from:handle" where "handle" is the handle of the website's Twitter, to avoid seeing our own tweets.
  
  Example: schoolido OR schoolidolu OR sukutomo OR http://schoolido.lu/ OR "schoolido.lu" AND -from:schoolidolu
- License news: Lists
  
  Lists should be created and kept up-to-date containing other Twitter accounts that share news about the license, allowing us to keep track of what's new and never miss anything.
  
  Examples of lists: "Official accounts", "Community accounts", "Voice actresses", "Important players", ...
- People who talk to us: Direct messages
  
  If you have the role "Support", this column will help you answer messages. See Support guide.
- Trending in the license: Search
  
  Search for hashtags frequently used in the license's community to keep an eye on what's trending.
  
  If you see something community-made that's cool (cosplay, art, events, initiatives, ...), feel free to like or retweet to show that we love our community.
  
  You may also discover new content you can tweet about through that column (in addition to our lists).
- Scheduled
  
  Tweets scheduled for the future. Because multiple community managers use the same account, it's good to keep an eye on what has been scheduled.
  
  If you see that some days in the future don't have a lot of content scheduled or nothing scheduled, start scheduling!
- What we tweeted recently: Profile
  
  Finally, because multiple community managers use the same account, it's good to keep an eye on what has been tweeted recently. If you see that not a lot of tweets have been posted recently, start tweeting!

[TODO: Include video cropped from sukutomo video]

Rules

Always include a link to our website (to relevant card/event/activity/...)
Grammar check and spell-check every single thing you post
Use plenty of emojis: ⏰ for countdown, 🎉 for celebrations, ✨ for anything shiny, 💖 for love gems, ⭐️ for star gems, 🎟 for scouting tickets, → to emphasize links, 🎀 or 👗 for cute dresses, 👘 for traditional outfits, 🏆 for contests, 🙇 to apologize, 💸 for affiliate links, and more - I usually look at the picture I'm about to send and search for emojis based on that.
Make sure you include the hashtags we use for the license. You can find the list of hashtags by going to your profile and clicking the Twitter share button (no need to confirm):
Always post happy, optimistic messages. Nothing negative or aggressive. Avoid sarcasm at all cost since most of our users are not native speakers.
When something is only valid for a certain version of the game, start your tweet with either the Japanese flag 🇯🇵 (JP version), Worldmap 🗺️ (EN version), or Taiwanese flag 🇹🇼 (TW version).
Try to post tweets with images most of the time (less than 1/10 tweet should be without images, not including replies)
The image should always look professional:
- if it's a screenshot, make sure you crop it to show only what matters
- you can make your own graphic edit to emphasize your message: example, example
The sooner you tweet about new stuff the better. Most of our new visitors, and therefore the growth of our website, come from announcement tweets! In other words, if something gets announced at 3:00pm, your goal is to tweet about it before 3:01pm

Content

Of course, what you tweet about differs from websites to websites. This should be a general guideline that can be used as a base for any website.

Within seconds 🔥

Some content needs to be tweeted extremely fast. That's because other Twitter accounts might tweet the same kind of content, and it's generally the first that posts that will get the most retweets.

Examples:

Whenever a new card or set of cards gets released
When a new event is announced
When a big license announcement is revealed (new idols, new logo, upcoming live)

This kind of tweets that are extremely time sensitive are currently our main source of traffic. For this reason, it's extremely important to have staff ready before they need to be posted and never miss any.

To tweet faster, we can:

Prepare re-useable templates of tweets
- Some should contain variables, but some should be a generic text and only the image changes
Test multiple tools and make sure we're using the fastest one (to send screenshots from phone to laptop, to crop images, etc)
Open Tweetdeck a few minutes before the announcement and have everything ready (text and images that are predictable)
Hit tweet as soon as possible!
DO NOT ask on Discord if you should do it: just do it!
- If multiple community managers tweet the same content, it's completely fine. Duplicates or similar tweets generally won't show up in users' timelines.
- You may ask and synchronize beforehand, if you plan enough time in advance.
- When duplicates happen, DO NOT remove them. Twitter caches its content and will still show the deleted one to followers, which might want to like/retweet, won't be able to and will have a bad experience

Daily

These are less urgent, but should still be checked daily. They generally correspond to news from the license, such as:

Announcements of new merch
General license news (including events happening in Japan only)
In-game news:
- Login bonuses
- Content update: comics, shop item change
- New songs, new levels
- New stories

💡 Good to know: for Japanese licenses, most major announcements get posted at 9 am or 10 am Japan time.

Scheduled

Some content can be scheduled in advance, such as:

Birthday of idols/members
Events/gachas reminders:
- 2 days, 1 day, 12 hours, 1 hour before it starts
- When it starts
- 2 days, 1 day, 12 hours, 1 hour before it ends
- When it ends
Affiliate links
Activities showcase
License news

If a lot of content gets announced the same day, scheduling some for the future is a good idea.

Site-specific Guidelines

Each site is managed differently, requiring different things from their Twitter Community Managers. Thus, we can't really go any more in-depth about what and how you are to post.

Down below is a table with links to guidelines for each site. We highly suggest you at least check out the links relative to your own site, but feel free to look at what the other sites have your job do too. These extra perspectives will hopefully aid you later on as you conduct your work.

Site's Twitter	Guidelines & More
@schoolidolu	Community Manager

School Idol Tomodachi: full detailed guide for all kind of tweets, with templates
School Idol Tomodachi: guide to setup alerts to make sure you don't miss anything
School Idol Tomodachi: birthday tweets guide
Bandori Party: full detailed guide for all kind of tweets, with templates

Old Guide Down Below