Building a community for your mobile game
Seeing your game acquire a community of players is one of the great pleasures of working in the games industry. Here are a group of people, most of whom will never have met each other, coming together to talk about your game!
But how do you build that community? How do you grow it, amplify it, communicate with it and become part of it? It’s a balancing act between letting something grow naturally without treading all over it, but not leaving the community to its own devices to the extent where people feel ignored. In this post, I’ll explore a few things to keep in mind when considering how to cultivate an engaged, happy community of players.
Go where the community is
There is of course much more to creating a community than simply making a Facebook page and a Twitter account, or sticking a share button in your game. A first step is to take a look to see if your game already has a community, and if so, what platform they’re using to talk about you. It could be that your most active players have already taken up residence on Reddit, or they’re already streaming on Twitch or uploading to YouTube.
If it already exists, then go where the community is, rather than forcing them to come to you. For example, if your players have already created an active Subreddit for your game, do you really need your own forum? Why not become part of the Reddit community instead?
Your players are showing you what feels like a natural fit for them, and you should strongly consider adapting your own strategy to join them.
Don’t feel the need to be everywhere at once
However, when it comes to managing your community, don’t spread yourself too thin. Do you really need a Pinterest presence or a Snapchat handle, in addition to being on Facebook, Twitter, Discord, YouTube, Instagram and Reddit? What makes each of these channels distinctive from the others, and is that something that’s going to directly benefit you?
If you’re just starting out, it may well be that you don’t have enough resource to cover all the bases in any case — focus on the channels that you feel will give you the highest return on your resource. Remember, it’s not enough to just have a Facebook page or a Twitter account — you’re committed to updating it with regular, engaging, fun and relevant content for the foreseeable future.
If something’s not working, try something else
A big part of effective community management is experimentation. Keep in mind that it’s very rare for any two communities to be alike, so don’t be afraid to try a whole range of different campaigns or strategies to see what works best for you. With the chart-topping game Fun Run, they trialled a contest where a small number of players could win an exclusive Golden Fox character that couldn’t be obtained anywhere else in the game. The rarity of the item — and the fact that it was highly visible to all other players of the game — led to a huge spike of interest in the contest, and it became a regular and much-anticipated event within Fun Run.
However, bear in mind that your super-effective community strategy for Game A might fall flat with players of Game B. This doesn’t just apply to campaigns you run on social, but also to which platforms you use. You may have one game that’s become a YouTube sensation and has hours of video content being created every day… but then your next game just doesn’t get that traction on the same platform. Keep an open mind and experiment.
Make things easy for your players
One of the key aspects of building your community is the importance of making it as easy as possible for your players to do what they want. Whether that’s sharing their achievements online or communicating with devs, removing barriers from that process is an ideal way to develop a thriving community.
As it happens, this was one of the first triggers for Megacool’s foundation: we saw that Fun Run players would post their screenshots on Twitter. This behaviour was something that they undertook on their own, and was a pretty awkward experience: take the screenshot, leave the game, open Twitter, post the tweet, return to the game. We thought to ourselves: “this is awesome, but what if we made it easier for players to do it?” So we added a share button that triggered after each race, and allowed players to share to Twitter — and, of course, saw those Twitter shares increase exponentially. Then we started thinking about what would be even better than sharing screenshots… and moved onto GIF sharing.
Look at what your players are talking about, what engages and excites them in the game, and also how and where they are sharing their experiences. Think about how you can amplify those moments, perhaps by removing some barriers or by incentivising in the form of in-game rewards or contests on social media. Always be thinking, how can I make it easier for our players to do the things they like to do?
Think about the next level
Once your community is established, what then? Of course, maintaining an active and engaged community is a challenge of itself and requires a lot of time and effort… but you should also start to plan where to go next.
Something to explore is paying a little extra attention to your biggest fans. There’s nothing revolutionary about this approach — after all, these players pay the most attention to you, why not return the favour?
For example, a Discord or Facebook group can be an invite-only space for your most engaged players to come together and talk with other players, or share their top experiences from the game. High-engagement posts — for example, those with an active discussion in the comments — will keep resurfacing to have long-lasting relevance and allow for meaningful conversations to develop. Groups are becoming an even more central part of the Facebook experience and can have huge potential for your game’s community.
But even if your game hasn’t yet grown to such astronomic levels, your biggest fans may well be the ones that help you get there. If you can sufficiently engage your most active players, they may well become advocates for your game and spread the word to those who are yet to discover it.
There are all kinds of ways to turn a player into an advocate — although like other aspects of community management, there’s no one-size fits-all approach and you’ll need to carefully consider what might have the greatest appeal. From exclusive, personalised in-game items to featuring player-created content on your social pages, these small steps can all build stronger relationships and greater engagement from your most passionate players. Get this right and those players will go on to tell others about your game and why it’s great.
Nurturing your community
Having a healthy two-way relationship with your community is one of the best ways to not only keep your existing players happy, but to expand your audience. Remember that collectively your playerbase may know the ins and outs of your game even better than you do — and that’s something to be nurtured, encouraged and acted upon. Having a channel of communication with your players, on a platform that suits them, will lead to meaningful conversations, ideas, suggestions, and happier players overall.
