Deus Ex Social Media Benchmark
I ran a social media benchmark of two competing video game studios; Eidos Montreal and Ubisoft. Both studios have a new game about to be released to the market; Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tom Clancy's The Division, respectively.
Objective
Compare and contrast the social media marketing efforts of both video games and bring optimization suggestions for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided social media marketing strategy.
Mediums Selected
Both of these video games communicate via the most popular social media mediums. Both games primarily use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube as their marketing mediums.
These mediums are the most popular for both games and represent the large emphasis put on the marketing for these titles. Both Deus Ex and Tom Clancy games do utilize other platforms such as Reddit, Google+,Tumblr or Steam to communicate to their user base, but I will conduct the analysis for the four largest and most profitable platforms for this benchmark.
Facebook Market Share
Facebook, being the most popular communication platform of the last decade, is always taken into consideration when choosing a marketing communication medium. Facebook allows marketers to post not only text content but also pictures, videos, events, milestones and more, as well as giving them a direct line of communication with the user base, which is primordial to a video game studio.
With a quick number crunch between the two Facebook fan pages for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tom Clancy's The Division, we can clearly see a trend setting in.
Despite the fact that The Division has more fans, more total number of shares, comments and likes, the Deus Ex game’s user base is much more engaged, which is exactly what game studios are looking for. Having an engaged user base provides for a more open communication level for product improvement, suggestions, Q&As as well as an honest reaction to the marketing content being promoted. Having a healthy and engaged community is a much more positive outcome than a community which simply consumes the content without providing any feedback or engagement.
Suggestion
Most users prefer the videos and pictures content types, as shown in the engagement matrix below. A productive step forward would be to increase the number of posts per day of the most popular types to at least 0.7 posts per day, at the most opportune times most importantly throughout the weekends (as there are currently no posts made during the weekend), to keep the user base engaged and to drive even more engagement from the fans as the game release date approaches. Additionally, keeping the user engaged via replies to their comments on the posted content will keep the conversation going and show users a much more motivated community.
Twitter Market Share
Similarly to Facebook, Twitter has become a staple platform when it comes to short communications with the user base. Not only does Twitter allow for a quick communication platform, it has also become a more streamlined way for fans to communicate directly with the game team as well as with the studio itself.
Continuing on a similar train of thought as for the Facebook data, we can see that The Division Game outperforms the Deus Ex Twitter platform comparison. Yet despite having more followers and retweets & likes for their content, we can see that Deus Ex, again, has a better performing engagement rate. This shows us that the fan base of the game is very steady across several platforms, which results in a better and overall healthier fan community.
It should also be noted that the Twitter platform for Deus Ex is being used mainly to directly communicate with the fans in the form of tweet replies and answers to questions, as shown in the following chart.
Suggestion
Twitter is a platform which is limited by its number of characters and the fact that fan’s feeds are jam-packed with the content of other users they follow. Therefore, marketing content should be short, concise, and delivered several times throughout the day.
A productive move forward would be to increase the number of tweets per day to at least 4.5-5 tweets as well as picture posts as they are more noticeable, and continuing to use the current strategy of interaction with users.
Instagram Market Share
Instagram, being a social media platform mainly built for graphical assets sharing, represents a great opportunity for games which have yet to be published, in order to showcase their upcoming material. Deus Ex has been doing exactly this, and currently has a strong strategy of sharing concept art, making short behind the scenes videos and regularly featuring fan art.
As shown above, the comparison between both games shows a strong curvature towards the Tom Clancy game, yet we need to probe deeper than just the numbers for this particular case.
Despite the fact that The Division game has a stronger number of followers as well as comments & likes for their posts, we must take into account what the main use of The Division game is for this platform. Tom Clancy’s new game currently has only 24 posts in total and of these posts,9 of are promotional access codes for their beta. This is a decent strategy, yet it does not represent a fair engagement and healthy community for the developer. Most of the likes and comments are only for those 9 posts, which are consumed and forgotten the moment that all the codes are used.
On the other hand, Deus Ex platform has a total of 147 posts, of which the majority are concept, character and game art. The comments and likes are well represented for each post and the engagement is quite a bit stronger for the title as we can see in the graph shown above.
Suggestion
There is currently nothing wrong with the Instagram strategy used by Deus Ex. The posts being created are designed to engage the fans as well as promote and create excitement in the community for the upcoming game.
A possible improvement would be to spread out the marketing material to be more evenly distributed throughout the week. As shown in the graph below, the posts are mainly being made on Mondays and there is a lack of content on Fridays and Saturdays, which are high traffic days for the platform and would surely generate more buzz around the posts.
YouTube Market Share
YouTube is possibly the best place to promote your video game content. All the fans want to see how the game is played, the story line, how good the graphics are as well as wanting to experience the game-play itself, even if they are only viewing it. This strongly correlates with the Let’s Play videos trend which have been very popular for a number of years.
In this department, Deus Ex takes the upper hand. Not only does the Deus Ex channel have more subscribers, it also has quite a few more likes for its videos, which shows a community that likes the content and game progression they see. It also uploads several more videos per month than its counterpart, The Division game.
Both channels currently use the YouTube medium in order to showcase their trailers and upcoming game footage, as well as providing content for the community such as Q&A’s and behind the scenes footage.
Suggestion
The current strategy appears to be working very well and does not require much change. The videos do take time to create, hence why users are slightly less involved than with other social media networks.
However, it would be a good idea to distribute previews of the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided game closer to the release date to popular Youtubers. These previews allow the gaming community to see the actual game-play before the release date and create excitement and buzz for the consumers. Popular Youtubers such as theRadBrad and Tetra Ninja, who have played in full the previous games and made Let’s Play videos, are an excellent option.
*I am in no way affiliated with the Deus Ex franchise, Tom Clancy’s franchise or its respective studios. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
**The data is in relation to the time period of Jan. 10th 2016 to Feb. 6th 2016, except for the YouTube data which spans the last 7 months.