Data: Social media scorecard
Data provided by digital marketing agency Stickyeyes shows why casino brands are consolidating their social channels
The egaming sector is dominated by multi-product, multi-service brands. These brands offer a full range of services (sportsbook, casino, poker, bingo and slots), and talk to very different audiences through these products.
Because these audiences were, in some cases, extremely different from each other, many of these brands utilised very distinctive and separate social media strategies to engage them. If the typical sportsbook audience was very different from the typical poker audience it stood to reason that very different forms of communication and different platforms were needed to engage them. It led to many brands creating separate social media profiles for each product area that they served, but this came with challenges.
Firstly, there were cost implications. Managing multiple communities and distributing content to them forced brands to create individual content, it meant monitoring multiple channels at once and it meant that, if a brand wanted to amplify its content through targeted promotion, it would be investing multiple times to reach smaller pools of community. Not only is this model inefficient in terms of managing the community, it is also inefficient from a brand activation perspective.
Having customers spread across multiple communities adds a barrier to conversion, making it difficult to cross-sell products to your audiences. Whilst there may be big differences between the sportsbook and bingo audiences, you may find similarities between the audiences of poker and casino. Having separate communities for these products creates a barrier between them, and results in a leakage of potential customers from one product to the other.
A consolidation of social communications
A number of brands still follow this community model. 32Red, for example, maintains dedicated and distinctive social communities for poker, casino and bingo, but many e-gaming brands are now challenging this approach, bringing their multiple accounts into one, singular community presence.
And it is these brands that lead the way in social media activity in this sector, with Paddy Power leading the way, followed by Betfair and Unibet.
Stickyeyes ranks social media performance using a dedicated scorecard, which measures a number of factors to assess the engagement across a range of social channels. This approach is designed so that it measures quality metrics, rather than volume, so as not to unduly reward brands based purely on the size of their audience.
Paddy Power scores 95 out of 100 on our social scorecard, with this score reflective of both the volume and quality of the engagement that it receives for its content. The second strongest brand is Betfair, which some way behind with a score of 78.
This scorecard is also reflective of the way in which many brands have consolidated their social presence. Given the wealth of reactive content that surrounds the sportsbook market, it perhaps isnât surprising that the leading brands on social media all lead with their sportsbook service. This compares with the pure play casino brands, such as Sky Vegas, Bgo.com and Gala Casino, where there is much less content available due to the comparatively static nature of the sector.
These high scores are also largely due to how effective these brands have been in developing a holistic social media strategy that fosters a strong community across all of the key platforms and Paddy Power in particular is one of the few gaming brands that has successfully integrated their main site with all of their social media assets in order to directly engage consumers.
A complete social strategy
We can see from the platform engagement that Paddy Power has developed strong engagements across multiple touchpoints, leading the way on key engagement metrics such as Facebook shares, Twitter retweets and content amplification, whilst coming second in YouTube views.
Other brands have struggled to achieve similar levels of consistent performance across all channels, with Bgo.com in particular struggling to generate engagement on Facebook and Twitter.
These brands need to work heavily on their fledging social programmes and develop an outbound social campaign that encourages high levels of two way discussion on a regular basis, if they are going to succeed in delivering positive organic sentiment on social media, which will ultimately support their customer acquisition activity.