How to Grow a Gaming Community

If you’ve been keeping up to date with our blog, you’ll understand by now that video game community management is a key piece of your game marketing strategy puzzle. But if you are new to the game (excuse the pun), then it can be difficult to know how to grow your fan base.

Growing a community successfully means bringing people who share a common interest together and keeping them involved. It’s without a doubt that in this day and age, for a game to be truly successful you need to have a strong community that is going to keep your game alive and introduce it to new players, months or even years after its launch.

Let’s take a look at how you can grow your gaming community.

Ensure that you are on the right platforms

You will need to ensure that you are growing an online community where you know your target audience will be.

You may spend hours of precious time trying to grow a community on Instagram and then later realize that the gamers you want to target hang out more on Facebook and YouTube. Do your research before you progress any further.

For a good platform that we recommend considering, check out our blog Should You Consider Discord For Your Video Game Community?

Reach out and promote yourself

One mistake that some game developers make with their community management is not making an effort with promotion. Putting yourself out there may seem uncomfortable or nerve-wracking at first, but if you don’t promote yourself, how will people know that you exist?

There are a number of ways that you can draw attention to your community including:

• Reach out to your existing player base to keep them updated on the latest news
• Be active and consistent online
• Frequent relevant outlets such as Reddit, Polycount and GameSpot. Help out people with problems, while gently promoting your game.
• Get in touch with players that you think may like your game. Send them a message and invite them to beta test your game.
• Reach out to influencers and ask them to promote you on their channels. This may take a bit of research but connecting with the right influencer can work wonders. Find out how we can make it easy for you over at the Atisfyreach website!
• Do an ad campaign – you can reach a wider audience by using targeted Facebook ads and you don’t have to spend a lot if you are just starting out.

Offer value

It’s important to note that before you even start doing any promotion, that you have something to offer people when they come to visit.

• What does your community have to offer to them?
• Are you sharing content on Facebook that people want to read?
• Are you creating beautiful posts on Instagram?
• Are you providing regular updates on Twitter?

A community that doesn’t offer value is not going to be of any interest to gamers, so you need to ensure that you are giving people a reason to stay. The gaming industry has it easy when it comes to the type of content that you can create for your communities and this is something that is worth spending some time on.

Grow for the right reasons

As Nathan Lovato, a gaming design expert at Game Analytics suggests, people grow communities for two reasons:

• To have an audience that they can market to.
• To have a community of individuals to converse with.

Lovato has built his own community filled with people that are like-minded and that he can communicate with on a range of topics. Since gamers often see through standard marketing techniques, they are going to be much more interested in joining a community that is a place for connection and discussion rather than a constant marketing stream.

Keep everything above board

You’ve no doubt seen many accounts on Instagram and Twitter with hundreds of thousands of followers and wondered how they got there. While some of these accounts definitely grew organically, many people resort to this follow/unfollow business in the hope of attracting more followers. It may seem like a legitimate practice (although questionable), but by doing this you won’t be attracting the right kind of fans or doing any favors to your video game community management. You want fans that you can engage with in a positive way and who also want to connect with others in your community.

Good things take time

The important thing to remember is that there is no magical solution for growing a community quickly. While there are certain tricks like growth hacking to grow your following, it is better to grow your community organically. And this takes time, because you need to engage with people to gain their interest and then gain their trust which can’t happen overnight.

You need to understand the gaming communities and provide a reason for them to want to follow. The amount of work you put into growing your community will reflect on how big you can grow, and putting extra time into your content marketing will certainly pay off.

Remember, retention is extremely important. Building a positive community where everyone feels welcome should always be at the forefront of your mind.

Get your gamers playing!

Your players aren't gonna find your game themselves... unless your targeting strategies hit the mark and show them exactly what they want to see. Find out how to do this in Marketing to Gamers and the Gaming Community: The Complete Handbook.

Finding your tribe

Building your community is a tough job. As a game marketing agency, Game Marketing Genie will help you build a community to grow from strength to strength. Our team of specialists has been assembled from the best that the industry has to offer and our experience is second to none. Don’t believe us? Let’s have a chat!

Click here for more information on our content marketing services.