Zynga Encouraging Users to Tweet to Spread Facebook and MySpace Game

Despite the viral nature of the Facebook Platform, distribution can still be challenging. The most aggressive social game developers are finding additional ways to spur the growth of new titles - including spending millions on advertising. However, now we're seeing incentivized grassroots promotion for Facebook games spill over to another social platform: Twitter. A spate of Twitter games have launched recently, including SNODS, 140 Mafia, and Spymaster. In a nutshell, these games take the familiar Mafia Wars style of social RPG game play and tie it into the use of tweets for both play and viral distribution. Unfortunately, some of these games over-tweet what you are doing in game to Twitter followers, ranging from item purchases, to leveling up, to starting fights with other players. In many cases each automatic tweet yielded a bonus. Suffice to say, this caused some significant backlash. Since then, some developers have added more robust auto-broadcast settings, though Twitter desperately needs to build its own robust filtering systems. Nevertheless, these were small, new games, so the problem is not as bad as it could have been. However, now it seems that Zynga is jumping on board Twitter as well. Zynga appears to currently be using Twitter in the same fashion as games like Spymaster for its Facebook and MySpace app, Pirates: Rule the Carribean! While it is no Mafia Wars, one can see the potential issues. Pirates encourages automatic tweets through player rewards. Considering how much money Zynga players spends on in-game items and services, how many surveys they are willing to take, and how much time they invest into actually playing, the same dynamic could be starting on a much larger scale. The idea behind using twitter as a viral distribution method for social games is, in theory, a fantastic idea, but the problem is that without the proper filtering systems this good idea could partially backfire. In many cases, Twitter users have had to find other solutions to deal with the issue by either reporting it as spam or unfollowing users completely. There doesn't appear to be a significant backlash yet. Though Zynga’s Pirates is on the lower end of the company’s popularity chain, we could see future Zynga RPGs utilize this same idea. How would things work if the 13 – 14 million monthly actives for Facebook’s Mafia Wars tweeted their purchases, fights, and level ups?

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Zynga Encouraging Users to Tweet to Spread Facebook and MySpace Game

Christopher Mack

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Christopher Mack