Handing your twitter account to your most avid community member

Handing over the Twitter account of Gamestonk Terminal to an active community member and the impact it had on the project's growth and engagement.

When I started Gamestonk Terminal I had no idea of the reach and impact it would have. From getting over 3.5k stars on GitHub on the first single day alone, to trending on Reddit and receiving overwhelming feedback, to receiving a message from an ex-colleague based in Switzerland about my name being top 1 on Hackernews. As if this wasn’t enough, a couple of days later the project got featured by VICE Magazine and Daily Fintech.

As a result, my social life was impacted and had little time to even cuddle my puppy, due to the amount of feature requests, issues… the usual somehow ungrateful life of an open-source maintainer… I’m not complaining though, as I live for this.

Moving forward a couple of weeks, it became clear to myself that I was building a strong community around what can/will/should be a leading product in the emerging fintech industry and Internet 3.0. Therefore, I knew that github issues and discussions wouldn’t be enough to interact with all members of the community, so Discord turned out to be the best option going forward (let’s be honest: mostly because of the convenience that Discord offers to share memes, feel free to check my creations on our Discord, you can thank me later).

My next rookie mistake was thinking I could use Discord announcements and @ everyone, as a means for updating the community on new features. Being the #1 investment research free and open-source project on github gets you several PRs a day being merged, so in all the fairness the announcements were recurrent with constant several new features. You can check my one hour live programming stream of adding a feature to the terminal.

This is when I realized that Discord wasn’t the best place for this type of communication. I needed a platform where I could share these features ad-hoc and that only alerted users who wanted to be up-to-date with our latest features. And this is when I created our Twitter account, @gamestonkt.

Reviewing the history of our Twitter feed, you can see that this is exclusively what our handle was used for. It just shared new features every day. It felt like I was always playing catchup to the growing number of features piling up in the queue waiting to be announced on Twitter. With the project already having over 500 features in less 1 year, this inevitable outcome would be a surprise to no one. (yup, I repeat, over 500).

However, I felt like it missed personality... With time being a limiting factor — time was more efficiently used improving the terminal — the public facing demonstrations were a lower priority. When you believe this much in a product, the product ends up speaking for itself.

“If you build it, they will come” — Field of Dreams

It then occurred to me, why am I handling our Twitter? Why not leave this up to one of our most avid and vocal users that has been with project since beginning?

As Jim from “The Office” would do, let’s do a PROS & CONS table.

Pros

• The user represents the community that the twitter content is targeted at.
• The user is an active daily user and will help to demonstrate features in the terminal.
• The user is keen on learning the ins and outs of the product.
• This user is not only a user anymore but a friend given his interaction with the maintainers.
• Lastly, I get to spend time doing what I enjoy: coding and meme content on our Discord.

Cons

• The user finds out my mother’s maiden name and the name of my first pet.

This is really a no brainer the more you think about it. I think it depends a lot on the type of people you have in your community and how confident you are on this individual .

We were lucky, because we had the perfect fit: an active Discord user @Danglewood, who had built an engaged audience, generating over 130K+ in Reddit karma over Q2 2021. It was clear that @Danglewood was having an impact on driving traffic and user engagement by posting data and his personal research with screenshots of Gamestonk Terminal.

In the future, our report feature will allow easy sharing of this information, I already can’t wait for this. Through a combination of humour and truths, he was engaging the audience’s curiosity by providing them with ways to filter out the ever-present noise within stock market information.

It made sense to bring this approach to our Twitter feed which has since transformed and now offers insights, educational nuggets, and data as well as presenting new features. The end result speaks for itself!

On your end, what is your opinion? And why do you 100% agree that this was the best decision?