Hi, I'm Victoria! Join my Community Dev Newsletter for insight into games marketing, social, and community management. Get actionable tips, a skill testing question, and a roundup of resources straight to your inbox every month.
Optimizing your social media strategy ✨ Community Dev Newsletter #27
Published about 2 months ago • 10 min read
Community Dev Newsletter
Yooooooo.
Nothing clever to say here, just read!!!! It's worth it!!! TRUST!!!
This month's newsletter dives into:
Learn how to ✨optimize and measure✨ the success of your social media strategy
A new community discussion - create content ideas based off of A/B/C testing
32 interesting links and games community related job posts
Guest Post 🎤
This week is a guest post by the dazzling, hilarious, and incredibly smart Cindy Tran, Social Media Manager at Obsidian Entertainment! (We are not related, Vietnamese people only have 4 last names to choose from, IYKYK.)
I'm a huge admirer of Cindy's work - she's thorough, organized, and skilled at analyzing social media statistics in a way that completely confounds me. She's nailed several campaigns during her time at Obsidian and grew their TikTok to 100,000+ followers in 6 months.
And because I'm nosy, I asked her how she does it. More specifically: "How do you optimize your social media strategy?" Read on to steal her secrets!!
Being the ✨Content Creator✨ for a Studio
Cindy Tran: Thank you so much for giving me the space to share these insights. I’m honestly nervous to see how folks feel after reading this blog. (😭) (Victoria note: She killed it.) However, I am super excited to be here and more than happy to put my key findings into words that will help other developers and content creators grow their channels! Let’s start off with the qualitative research design.
The 3E Framework
What is the 3E Framework? To help us understand social engagement choices (Likes, Comments, Shares), we associate three key content themes to each choice: entertaining, engaging, and enticing. Entertaining content helps us understand how users perceive a post in one tap or click. It is an effortless way for the user to express interest through likes or reactions that boosts the likelihood they will see more relevant content on their feed. Engaging content motivates users enough to go through the effort of saying something about a post. Comments, replies, or tags drive traffic to a post based on conversations and user sentiment. Enticing content motivates users to let their own audience, circle, or public know about a post they’re interested in.
Here’s a list of notes and questions to ask that’ll help you prepare for and integrate the themes in your content strategy research:
Please note that the information below can be used interchangeably but is listed to help set a foundation or to use as a template!
ENTERTAIN (Likes) Personable content that users want to like or react where they’ll come back for more. Focus on what keeps your brand connected to the user because “this content gets it or get me.”
Are users genuinely entertained by the content?
What do I need to do to maintain the attention of users where they’re willing to give a like?
Is it FUN?
ENGAGE (Comments) Comments and Replies should feel like a forum for your users to engage with one another. Engage with them or their content too because “I need to talk to someone about this!”
How do I invite users organically to comment and interact with my content?
Do they engage with other users?
Is it COOL?
ENTICE (Shares) Content that drives user urgency to share it with someone they know. Grassroots approach that pushes users to act beyond liking and commenting. Updates and announcements that keep users informed about where they’ll retain and share that information because “I need everyone to know about this!”
Why is it important for the user to share the information I’m delivering?
Is it drawing new users and are those users willing to share it with others?
Is it INTERESTING?
What’s the most important content theme here? What’s primary, secondary, and tertiary? It’s interchangeable and totally up to you! As an example, here is how I would label the 3Es for an informative update announcement for a multiplayer game.
ENTERTAIN (Likes) | Tertiary. Low-effort for users and low-value to us. Update announcements are catered toward our core audience and existing followers so we’re not too focused on all audiences. We forecast less likes for this post based on the performance of previous update posts.
ENGAGE (Comments) |Primary. High-effort for users and high-effort to us. Measure user sentiment and conversations related to the update. Comments are the lowest and hardest metric to drive users to do but they’re so valuable. We value comments and replies to report to developers that users are genuinely happy. We forecast high traffic in the comments/replies section so users can express their thoughts authentically and will help boost the impressions for the algorithm! Don’t forget to reply back.
ENTICE (Shares) |Secondary. Medium-effort for users and medium-value to us. Users who share are organically introducing or refreshing our content to other people they know. We forecast a ton of shares because users can play the newest update with their friends.
Whether you have a viral video or gameplay trailer, priorities for the content themes will always shift depending on the content itself. If you’re a visual learner, I’ve prepared a 3E Framework Venn Diagram based on the work of the Obsidian Communications Team.
The Obsidian Venn Diagram for Content Strategy
If you’re not sure where to start in your qualitative research, Victoria did an excellent piece titled “Doing a Competitor Analysis ✨ Community Dev Newsletter #15”. Check out her suggestions in the How and where can you find competitors? section of the blog. Competitor analyses are a great way to plan, measure, and scale your content while serving as a reference for key performance indicators and forecasting post-performance. Player sentiment, trending topics, and competitor habits will help you position your brand!
What’s the Next Step?
Testing, testing, testing! 📋 For this, I will use TikTok as an example. When we first launched the Obsidian TikTok account, I took the following steps:
You, The User.
I installed TikTok, for me! I made sure to Like and Comment on videos to train the algorithm to cater content to my liking. Anything irrelevant? I marked it as “Not Interested” and blocked hashtags. If you understand how the algorithm works For You, the algorithm will (likely) work in your favor when discovering content as a consumer.
Once my For You was actually for me, I had insights on how the TikTok algorithm worked in early 2021. I started to follow video game accounts and tested to see if I would be shown every video or specific content related to game developer accounts. The algorithm showed me both specific content from the developer account and new content made by the community. I felt ready to test the TikTok algorithm after some research as a business.
(This is extra.) I wanted access to the Creator Marketplace to learn more about it from the content creator perspective, but it required 10,000 followers. I followed the strategy above and was able to go from ~4,000 to ~11,000 in less than two weeks as a niche cosplay content creator in 2023. This is not necessary, but it helped me understand the algorithm more for me as a creator.
You, The Company.
Once you’re familiar with the social media channel of your choosing, here’s the fun quantitative part. Let’s run an A/B Test! Well, not exactly but we’re doing something similar (and doesn’t cost anything which is a plus). Here’s our made-up proposal for TikTok.
A/B/C Testing Exercise – Planning
Title: “The Baked Croissant-icles”
Description: A D20-licious fantasy role-playing adventure game! You are the Baker, a pastry chef who isekai’d into a world of bread and trouble. Defeat the Roll of Cthulhu, who infects the world with yeast and despair, to return to your original world. Let’s get this bread!
Proposal – Three Pillars
ENTICING ~ Primary | Let’s Get This Bread (Story) – ≤1 minute Announcement Trailer that covers all three pillars but informative on the story and environment
ENGAGING ~ Secondary | Bread Roll into Action (Gameplay) – ≥30 second video of action, weapons, and more gameplay features from the developers of the game
ENTERTAINING ~ Tertiary | Half-Baked Honey Buns (Companions) – ≤30 second video introducing the hot and glazed romanceable companions in a #fancam
KPIs (per video, excludes Impressions)
≥100,000 Likes
≥200 Comments
≥2,000 Shares
≥306,600 Total Engagements
A/B/C Testing Exercise – Results
Please do not use the numbers mentioned as a reference as they are made up for this exercise. Anyway, here’s our mock results. Ciabatta be kidding me!
Key Insights
~510,450 overall engagements which is +66% than our target overall engagements.
Story has the most likes, 150% more than our target. Positive sentiment overall.
Takeaways are to run a sentiment report and see what users are looking forward to the most for our environments, story, and characters. Log number of mentions for each focus to rank then consider data for next test.
Gameplay has the most comments, users were talking about the baguette dagger then providing us suggestions on other baked weapon ideas. Positive sentiment but less focus on our gameplay.
Takeaways are to focus on item customization and leave other gameplay footage as separate content. Do a word cloud and listening report to see what users are talking about and make content on the most popular topics.
Companions have the most shares, hit target for Likes but lower than expected considering the Shares.
Takeaways are to take any feedback from users and bake our companions into popularity then to serve our audience. Identify trending content or work with creators to grow interest.
Conclusion
Do your research! Perform a competitor analysis and familiarize yourself with user behavior and the algorithm on social media channels you plan to post on.
Set qualitative goals for your content and ask all the questions to discover the right AND wrong questions.
Label content themes to organize your strategy.
Run an A/B/C Test on all social media channels to understand what works natively on each channel.
Log data, analyze, and report key metrics to benchmark KPIs.
Network and talk to other folks in the industry to share non-confidential findings.
___
I could go on for hours, but I think that’s all the time we have! If you’re interested in discussing more about content optimization and social media metrics, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn! I’m happy to share, and in-turn learn, from folks who are as passionate about this stuff as I am. ☝🤓
Every month we do a skill testing exercise or discussion question together.
The question:
Think of the 3Es you just learned! (Enticing, Engaging, Entertaining.) Similar to Cindy's A/B/C Testing Exercise for “The Baked Croissant-icles”, create your own A/B/C content ideas using each of the 3Es for your own game. Or if you don't have one, pick your favorite game!
Feel free to email me back with your answer - I always respond to them. My answer will be in the next newsletter!
Last week's activity:
Let’s see how other teams work!
How do you coordinate with the dev team about what goes into something like patch notes or a dev log?
For instance: - Do you get to decide what to communicate? How do you decide that? - Does your content need to go through an approval process? - Are you told what to write, or do you check documentation about the milestone?
This one had a lot of fun responses - it ranged from people who didn't need to go through any sort of approvals process because they were given full ownership, to those who had to get it checked through various team members because of how hefty updates were.
On the Innersloth end, our lovely producers set up clear areas and dashboards for each milestone, and then the community team will go into those areas and pick out the most interesting/relevant things to highlight in the dev log. No approvals need by any other teams, but I will be the last approver/checker of things. 🤓
When deciding what to put in dev logs or patch notes, I always try to think of it in terms of the biggest value add to players (e.g. major bug fixes), but also communicating that in easily repeatable terms. For me, a measure of "success" for a message is if someone is able to remember and repeat it back to others in their own words. You can see this when, for example, a community member will reply to a forum post talking about a bug and saying "I read somewhere that they fixed it." They don't need to know how we did it or what, so long as the message is clear and easily spreadable.
Community Chatter 💬
Here are the interesting and helpful things I've seen this past month.
General News
Reddit added new features to make AMAs better! You can now schedule AMAs, invites guest collaborators, and officially "close" them. Participants can now RSVP and sort answered questions.
Unity - Senior Community Manager, Community Media (Montreal, Canada)
Voicemod - Junior Community Manager (Remote, Spain)
Wicked Saints - Social Media & Community Manager (Remote)
Zynga - Community Manager (Austin TX or Bay Area CA, US)
Hope everyone is staying strong from all of the June festivity preparation!! So many gaming showcases going on. (I'm biased but I hear Summer Game Fest will have some things related to my work in there teehee and also Wholesome Direct...!) But veeery excited for everything to come!
Success through shenanigans with community management.
Hi, I'm Victoria! Join my Community Dev Newsletter for insight into games marketing, social, and community management. Get actionable tips, a skill testing question, and a roundup of resources straight to your inbox every month.
