How Community Managers Use Analytics to Understand and Serve Players Better

As community managers, a key part of our job is to make sense of hundreds of discussions happening across multiple platforms and capturing insight from those discussions to help teams better understand how fans feel. When we’re not actively supporting community members or driving discussion, we’re analysing what’s going on.

Through analysis, we can understand community sentiment and begin to quantify the opinions and attitudes of your fans. We can also extract specific feedback, for example complaints around bugs and exploits in a game, and use data from the community to determine how important these are to players. All of this information is rich and detailed, and so we make use of tools and processes to help expose the most valuable insights, and surface them for our stakeholders. 

Community analysis is an ongoing project as we consistently watch how our communities grow and change over time. As you start to look to your community for insight, there are three areas of critical importance you should focus on first.

Community Growth

Tracking your community growth is an important part of understanding how your players react to news about your game or franchise and can be pretty telling of what further analysis is going to show. Growth in a community after a new patch or content update to a game would indicate the game is moving in the right direction, while decline would indicate that players aren’t happy and are disengaging with the community. 

For example, Discord’s Server Insights page can be used to track new users, engagement, and daily posts.

Tracking this ebb and flow shows us how the community reacts. We monitor this at least weekly so you have a baseline with which to compare peaks and troughs. You can also use data regarding your users demographics such as age, location or gender. That information can be used to tailor your strategy for engaging and communicating with your community through tone of voice, social strategies, and potentially partnerships.

Community Sentiment

Understanding growth patterns provides you with a broad understanding of your community. Analysing what your community is saying helps the entire team to understand specific issues. 

What feels like a small change to us can have a massive impact that stakeholders can’t predict. Take for example a change to a character class in a game; a change like this can have a profound effect on a small selection of players, but may go unnoticed by players of other classes… unless that class change leads to a shift in the games broader balance in which case the community will be quick to let you know. 

Analysing how players have been affected by changes and visualising it for the team can help bring attention to fan reactions, shape future changes to the game, and give marketers and community managers the tools they need to manage expectations. 

Social listening tools can be used to automate sentiment analysis across multiple social channels, offering a Community Manager comparative insight between platforms and make it easier for stakeholders to benchmark themselves against competitors. 

Breaking community sentiment down into topics is highly recommended, such as revealing how bugs, balance, or suggestions are discussed to show your team what aspect of the game they need to focus on. While all feedback is important, the focus should be on constructive criticism. And of course, positive feedback is just as important for both keeping your attention focused on what your fans love, and as a great way to keep the team's morale high.

Bug Reporting

Communities can be a particularly powerful source for game developers to identify issues in their games. Players will often head straight to Discord/X/Facebook etc. when they face a problem. Collating these reports as part of your weekly sentiment update allows devs to see how persistent the issue is and how many people are affected by it, giving them an idea of what to focus on. 

Setting up specific channels in Discord can be a great way for users to report issues, it also gives the community a place to provide support to each other.

Addressing small bugs quickly and acknowledging them with the community can often lead to small wins and help to build trust with your players by showing that you are listening.

Keys to Analysing Your Community

In summary, you can drive deep insight into your community through three major actions:

• 1. Track your community growth/decline, particularly around important announcements
• 2. Break down what your community is saying by sentiment, here’s some suggestions;
  • Sentiment - Very Negative, Negative, Positive, Very Positive
  • Topics - In-game, Community, Feedback, Bugs, Updates
  • Platform - Discord, X, Instagram, etc.
• 3. Collate the data and highlight key talking points. Present the data in an easily digestible format, usually slides or an infographic that shows where the team should focus their efforts

Getting these three areas right is the foundation to community analytics. However, as communities grow bigger, more diverse and more engaged, they provide ever richer insight for community managers to extract. These more complex communities require more sophisticated techniques to manage and understand. 

In the dynamic world of game development, understanding and engaging with your fandom community is crucial. At Keywords Studios we’ve partnered with industry leaders to enhance community experiences. For instance, our collaboration with Marvel Rivals led to the creation of a safe, engaged, and thriving community, demonstrating our commitment to effective community management.

By leveraging data-driven community insights, you can build stronger player engagement and enhance your game’s success. Our team at Keywords Studios is dedicated to guiding you through this process. Use the form below and let's connect to explore how we can elevate your community presence together!