[EDITORIAL] Falcom and Twitter

falcom_twitter

BasicInformation

It all started on Jan 19, 2010: Falcom decided to join the world of twitter. In this amount of time, they have managed to amass over 44,000 followers, and are very active on the network: having published over 18,157 tweets as of this writing (when looking back at an earlier draft of this post back in June, they had 17,800 tweets at that time- 300 tweets in less than a month!). In the past few months they have finally become an official ‘verified’ account. The oldest post I can track down is from 1/24/2010.

In the early days of twitter apps, you could tell that there were multiple users running the account, from multiple phones and twitter applications. Watching their tweets, you can see this as well. Simultaneous tweets from two different locations have happened in the past. Who is on Falcom’s twitter account? I don’t know. I only have some suspicions, but amongst them, I’d imagine that Ika-chan is one of them.

Falcom follows a ‘follow-back’ philosophy – if you follow them, they are very likely to follow you in return. There has been at least one person on the twitter account that has lived in the United States (Arlington, Texas, in fact) at one point, even, which makes it possible for them to respond to English language tweets. (I suspect the person from Arlington is the same person that requested I take my crocheted Poms to the Stockyards once upon a time. :D)

When they respond to tweets, they usually don’t use the typical ‘response’ method, but moreso they retweet and place the response before the original tweet. This is more of a standard response type in Japan.


In the past three years, Falcom’s become very social on twitter. As it has been pointed out to me, the often wish their followers ‘good morning’ at the start of the work day. The following tweets are from the same week when I started writing this article:


Fans and Falcom on Twitter
* Falcom has also shown a love for fan-bots. They even have an entire list devoted to them.

Fan bots are your basic bot type programs on twitter, except instead of spamming people, they’re programmed to talk like fictional characters, or repeat lines that said fictional characters have said. That, or you may find quote accounts or other things. There are bots for many Kiseki characters (which are actually programmed to interact in a bit, it seems!) and Ys characters, amongst others.

* When the Tohoku earthquake happened in Japan in 2011, the first thing that made me notice that something was wrong was a single tweet from Falcom: “Is everyone okay?!!!” The rest of their tweets for March 11th after the earthquake were alerts and helping people who follow their account.


* They’ve always seemed to be accustomed to English speaking fans in America or Europe… but their reactions from fans in other countries are generally great.


But let it be known that they do love their fans, in and out of Japan:


Anytime Falcom gets a tweet from somewhere unexpected, they often have priceless reactions.

The end result of this article is not to be afraid of tweeting to Falcom, even if you can’t speak in Japanese. They may not always respond, but they do make an effort to do so when they can. The account is most active during the week, Monday through Friday, Japan work hours, as this is when the company is running. This doesn’t mean they won’t be quiet on the weekends. You may get a surprise response or two during that time period.

Are there other “official” accounts related to Falcom?

Related Twitter Accounts
Many of these are likely not run by people from Falcom, but other companies and those development teams. (With one exception!)
jdkTV on Twitter
Zero no Kiseki Evolution Twitter Account
Falcom Radio
Falcom Magazine
Field Y – Publisher for Falcom Magazine
DragonSlayer for iOS and (eventually) Android
Sorcerian for iOS
Sora no Kiseki the Animation

jdk Band Members
The jdk Band is super active on twitter, many of the members tweeting to each other back and forth, even!

Kanako Kotera – jdk Vocals and Diva
Icarus Watanabe jdk Vocals
Toshiharu Okajima – “Okaji” – jdk drummer and Falcom game collector
Masaru Teramae – “Angelo”, one of the band’s guitar players
Enomoto Atsushi – jdk Bass player. “Sukebass”
Noriyuki Kamikura – jdk Keyboardist. “Kamicha”
Mizuki Mizutani – jdk Violinist. Amazingly sweet on twitter.

[ @NihonFalcom on Twitter ]

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