Discussion Speculation: Nintendo randomly updates the official Fire Emblem Facebook page

[Dekuman]

I am very aware of this, but regardless, it should not be a problem for a company like Nintendo. After all, the Japanese branch of the company has no problem doing it.

Also, while I know it’s certainly not the same as a professional social media job, I ran my group (which wasn’t just some tiny unknown fan group, you know—it was one of the largest StreetPass groups in the country with thousands of followers and hundreds of active members, which is a lot for a relatively niche local meet up group—and in addition to that I also ran the accounts for a social media campaign that went viral internationally and actually prompted a response from Nintendo, if the StreetPass group isn’t enough) and its social media accounts as if it was one, adhering to the same kind of standards that you’d see on Nintendo’s official accounts in a way that, frankly, most fan accounts simply don’t—ensuring posts are positive and professional, using proper official terminology and correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and, yes, ensuring that posts about games are consistent with the actual games themselves (as someone who actually plays all Nintendo games that part comes easy), in addition to other expected duties like running ads and managing insights, creating images and videos, coordinating events, etc. And while we didn’t really deal with reposting Japanese content in English, if we had I wouldn’t have ever just thrown something into a machine translation and regurgitated it on our accounts, and it’s kind of insulting to assume I would have (though not an unreasonable assumption, I suppose, because plenty of fan accounts do just that).

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Anyway, my point is I’m not totally detached from the reality of what’s expected from running an official social media account, and the fact is that managing additional accounts for the series that have them in Japan is absolutely something that should be very well within Nintendo of America’s ability. And localization from Japanese to English is kind of their thing, so I can’t imagine why you’d expect localizing Japanese posts to be a problem for them.

Kit and Krysta addressed this a few times.

General tweets out of the Nintendo of America account need to be vetted and approved up the chain

NCL likes to make accounts for each game and tweet out of them. NOA (under Kit) doesn't like it and only have a few of them. The argument is its less effective to communicate when the audience is split over many accounts.

All art used have to be approved, sometimes down to the pixel placement of elements. There is only a set of allowed art they can use. No last minute photoshops.

Translating posts from NCL Twitter is easier and they have specialists for that including members of the tree house to ensure gameplay elements are correctly described (someone was asking them about issues with Splatoon 3 twitter translations)

Most importantly managing Twitter is not the person's only job.

Finally Nintendo sees everything on their socials, they simply have a policy of not responding. Also there is no guarantee that because they see it something will happen. Often times, nothing happens.

 

[Tye]

Kit and Krysta addressed this a few times.

General tweets out of the Nintendo of America account need to be vetted and approved up the chain

NCL likes to make accounts for each game and tweet out of them. NOA (under Kit) doesn't like it and only have a few of them. The argument is its less effective to communicate when the audience is split over many accounts.

All art used have to be approved, sometimes down to the pixel placement of elements. There is only a set of allowed art they can use. No last minute photoshops.

Translating posts from NCL Twitter is easier and they have specialists for that including members of the tree house to ensure gameplay elements are correctly described (someone was asking them about issues with Splatoon 3 twitter translations)

Most importantly managing Twitter is not the person's only job.

Finally Nintendo sees everything on their socials, they simply have a policy of not responding. Also there is no guarantee that because they see it something will happen. Often times, nothing happens.

Okay, yes, I understand that. I always assumed the reason was because it’s easier for people to follow a single account rather than have things split it up between a bunch of different accounts…but as is, we don’t get all that same stuff that Japan gets on the main Nintendo account outside of Japan—not anywhere close! Also, there are pros and cons to each approach—while funneling everything into one account makes it easier for people to subscribe to, it can actually make it harder for people to keep up with and find news and other content because everything’s shoved into one big account with lots of posts, so good luck finding or seeing the rare post about whatever particular game/series you may be wanting to see stuff about. Having different accounts for each series alleviates this issue, and I honestly don’t believe that it’s difficult at all for people to follow multiple accounts that they’re interested in, especially when the social networks will straight up recommend them to you.

Again, all I’m really asking for is parity with the Japanese accounts, so pretty much just translating NCL social media posts—that’s not gonna have all the same overhead required and, as you said, there’s already a team of specialists for that. That absolutely should be within Nintendo of America’s ability. Also, I never said it was only one person’s job, and I have no idea why you’re going on about Nintendo not responding because I never said anything about expecting them to respond—I’m very aware that they don’t respond via social media, and I have no issue with that.