How to Engage Your Players and Spark Virality

Helpshift had the pleasure of hosting two members from the Dots Team! Christian Calderon, Head of Marketing and User Acquisition, and his colleague Eric Glover, Community Manager. Christian and Eric both painted a detailed picture on how mobile companies of all sizes can create an engaged environment of advocates. Sparking virality around your app will ultimately lower the cost of user acquisition.

Key KPI’s to Spark Engagement & Virality:

Define what Engagement Means & Identify the Tools To Implement

For Dots, Engagement is defined by: any event that serves as an impression interacting with a user — negative or positive.
The most impactful channels for Dots are Twitter & Facebook: Retweet, Likes, Shares.
These types of engagements have the most impact on lowering CPI and actually correlate to the number of daily installs
It’s crucial to measure engagement over time. Need to collect a solid amount of data to analyze what is working, specifically related to Ad Spend.
Monitor your competition.
Build your strategy around the powerhouse engagements that drives true, personal and emotional discussion

Build your Social Content Strategy around What Your Users Crave

Content Success comes down to not only the content that is being pushed, but to the medium it’s pushed through.
Post videos directly to Facebook provide more engagement over posting because you have the propensity to reach more community members.
Share content that is relevant to people’s lives outside of the game/app. Content that is personal and relevant can spark more engagement than branded content.
Identify the content that resonates with your community and build off that.

Build the Right Team & Remember your Players are your People

The success of an app correlates directly to the team managing every business unit.
Understand the tone of your community and adapt your engagement and collaboration accordingly. For Dots, the community radiates humor, so they post internal content that sparks laughs.
Align the tone of your social media presence with the tone of your own company culture resonates with a highly engaged user base.
Encourage your players to become your promoters/app advocate by helping them when they need help.
Remember your user base is really looking for empathy and to feel like they’ve been heard. (Just taking this minor step goes a long way!)
Make sure your content is sharable and digestible.