Vanilla Forums Blog

Given the social nature of the internet, online communities offer a very rewarding experience to customers, to the extent that they’re among the most valuable of marketing tools . In fact, having a thriving community to complement your product or service is a key selling point in and of itself.

As a place where customers connect with each other and have direct access to your team, a community serves as a one-stop informational resource to help people get the most out of their purchases.

In the old days, gaming was a predominantly solitary affair. Sure, there were enormously popular titles, including little-known single-player games with intimate cult followings, but there were few opportunities for developers and players alike to build thriving communities.

Today, the power of online social communities has changed all that. We’re now even seeing entire genres and platforms (think the Amiga 500+ or Super Nintendo) being revived after decades of inactivity. In fact, there are now online communities dedicated to games that haven’t been in the charts for over twenty years, as well as a tendency to draw upon this nostalgia to inspire the development of newer takes on older titles.

Deciding whether to gate your community or leave it open to the public is one of the biggest decisions you make when building your platform.

Gating long-form content is a common strategy with B2B marketing. But when it comes to giving your members a place to hang out (as is the case with your community support and feedback forums), it’s quite a different matter. Recent years have seen a shift towards the gated community model, particularly in the B2B sector. Although there are cases when it’s better to remain open to the public or adopt a hybrid model, gating user-generated content provides some clear advantages.

Long before the advent of modern inbound marketing, word-of-mouth has been an important motivator for determining where people are willing to put their money. Whereas people used to look to  friends for advice on which was the best brand to buy from, however, it’s now more common for people to turn to the internet for advice. That’s why price comparison and consumer review websites quickly rose to prominence back in the late 90s.

When running a gaming community, you always have fans creating blogs and pages about your game. It’s just another way for fans to form friendships with people who share a love of their favorite game.

There are various types of fan pages which people create. Some can be friendly, where they share and support your game, while others can be harmful, promoting the use of unconventional methods to find cheats and exploits.

I’ve seen my share of pages over the years where the primary focus is to cheat the system and even sell secrets or bots. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about these pages and players unless you get a legal team involved or know someone at Facebook that can shut down each page – they will most likely just reappear later under a new name.