In the wake of Supercell’s huge deal which saw 51% of the company sold to Japanese companies SoftBank and GungHo for $1.5b, we take a look at the social media presence of their two games (Clash of Clans and Hay Day) on Facebook.

Questions bouncing around on social networks when the news broke included “Are they worth it?”, “Isn’t this another Zynga?” and surprise at the apparently large sum. We know that Clash of Clans has been the top grossing game on iOS for a long time, but does their performance on Social Media tell a different story? Using EzyInsights social media analytics, we can take a deeper look at how well they engage their fans on Facebook.

Clash of Clans
The first number that sticks out to us here is that the Clash of Clans Facebook page has over 600,000 fans, but also (as of this moment) over 80,000 ‘talking about this’ – which is Facebook’s own engagement metric. This gives a basic engagement percentage of 7.5% – staggeringly high. To put that into perspective, most brands with fan numbers of this size are aiming for around 1%.

The Clash of Clans Facebook page posts about 1.5 times a day – which is exactly the sort of number EzyInsights recommends. They are also totally on the ball when replying to fans. Not only is their response rate to wall posts sky high, but the following picture sums up why their replies are so valuable as part of building a loyal and engaged community:

Bear in mind that this is one out of thousands of posts made by fans directly to the Clash of Clans Facebook wall each month. So not only do the community managers answering the questions reply often, they make personal replies which are relevant thanks to a deep understanding of the actual game. Knowing the brand and product well is a feature of every great community manager we’ve encountered on Social Media. Helping people at the exact point they ask the question

Hay Day
Hay Day’s community managers are even better at replying to wall posts by fans, beating Clash of Clans by a significant percentage. However what particularly stands out for us with Hay Day’s community is the huge engagement they are capable of generating. Although Hay Day’s Facebook comments are somewhat dominated right now by users demanding a diamond confirmation button, what we can see is that a popular post can quickly generate over 20,000 comments.

A good image, combined with a direct question to the audience (the infamous call to action), and directly relevant content to the community add up here to what we call a ‘super post’. This is a great example of how involving the community – however casually – with development of your product can activate them very effectively.

Using the Ezy tool we can even have a look at the word counts and see which names were most popular:

The two-way nature of Social Media makes this sort of interaction between fans and creators simple and easy. Results can be seen at the touch of a button and shared with the audience to follow up and bring closure to the thread. Don’t leave your audience hanging!

In Summary
Neither wall is without problems of course. Hay Day faces a continual daily struggle against fans who have accidentally spent diamonds on cherry trees, and Clash of Clans features thousands of outraged boys posting in txt spk. Interestingly too, what we find with communities based around a single game is that although they are very keen to take part in conversation, they are not keen to share status updates as much as would be expected from other brands. This is not unique to Supercell but a general trend in games.

The overwhelming sentiment to take away is of a well managed and crucially well understood Facebook presence (for both games). The engagement level is the best we’ve seen so far, and this really makes Supercell the gold standard when it comes to Social Media presence for games.

Finally – we really have to thank Supercell. As a development partner to EzyInsights, their invaluable feedback helped shape and improve the tool we use. Clash on!