Is replying to tweets the secret to creating value for esports brands?
A look at the importance of reply tweets as a tool for organic growth for esports teams, focusing on Dallas Fuel and their competitors
There are two large elements to organic social media marketing, especially for esports brands, whose entire business model is often around building a fanbase for potential future revenue:
You must acquire fans and you must retain fans.
In sports, namely the most global sport in football, profit as a concept is seemingly laughable. The sociopolitical scope of the sport stretches wider than balanced books. Evidenced every two years as a World Cup or a regional nation-team tournament rolls around, the business of football becomes the businness of populism.
In most tech verticals, profit isn’t a distant pipe dream. If a route to monetisation isn’t already built-in to a startup’s product, it might already be solving monetisation in and of itself for adjoining verticals.
In esports — at least on the teams’ side — the world is a brand new manic labratory and venture capitalists are hoping some young scientists figure it all out.
Till then, we must acquire fans and we must retain fans.
Where do we funnel acquired and retained fans? Without a clear bottom to the growth funnel yet, we can surely deduce that a big, happy and engaged number on varying social media channels is a good place to hoard a community.
This is a coldhearted take on Community, but the reality for all but a handful of teams in this space — those who’ve diversified their product to beyond team performance — is that the fans they amass on social media are the clearest proof that future revenue can be reached.
Now, there are tens and hundreds of social media tactics we can review to measure successful social media growth by esports teams. But a tactic that sets out for both acquisition and retention is reengagement, or: replying.
Replying serves the purpose of both widening your reach to unique users through measured networking, but it also provides a chance to create a direct human connection otherwise impossible in a world with fewer and fewer physical fan-meets or watch parties.
As a tactic, it can be utilised on almost all social media platforms. But — forgiving that it’s geodemographically more homogenous than the likes of Instagram — Twitter has purposefully made replying a very public, and thus measurable, part of its product. On Twitter, a native post, a retweet or a reply are all equal, they’re all Tweets.
With presumption, esports teams on Twitter seem in general much likelier to utilise replying than non-digital-first industries like traditional sports, if only because the uptake on a personalised tone of voice is much more of a natural fit. In general, teams of a decent stature — somewhere around 100K followers and above — reply with 30% of their tweets, retweet with 20% of their tweets and natively post with the remaining 50%.
A data analysis of different esports teams
But, to measure esports teams’ use of this measurable reengagement tool against each other, I took a closer look at the franchised Overwatch League, an environment that gives us the closest chance of parity in page growth in esports. In a recent study by Twitter Gaming, it was found that Dallas Fuel’s Twitter page is the most mentioned team within OWL. Dallas Fuel, OWL’s second-most followered team, reply with 78.3% of their tweets. The rest of the league reply on average with 41.8% of their tweets.
Within the microcosm of OWL, Fuel lead the charge in replying and grow only less than the Washington Justice. The Houston Outlaws reply with 68.8% of their tweets and grow faster than all but four other franchises.
In the opening graph above — showing teams who reply with more than 50% of their tweets and also have 100K or more Twitter followers — Fuel and Outlaws find themselves alone in a quadrant of pages who both grow fast and also reply as a high percentage of their overall tweets. Cloud9 and G2 Esports skirt around 52.5% in replies but grow at 2.9% and 2.2%. TSM FTX and eUnited reply at around 73.5% but grow at a rate under 0.53%.
The other four esports organisations who reply with more than 50% of their tweets and also have 100K or more Twitter followers, however, are Team Secret, Giants Gaming, Wave and Fluxo.
Their growth — particularly Fluxo’s 60.2% and Wave’s 32.6% — is spectacular. Barring the community-reflective phenomena, Karmine Corp, who grow at 43.4% despite replying 15.2% of the time, and Sentinels, who grow at 72% and reply at 39.3%, few teams battle the above.
If acquisition and pure growth numbers are our goal, there are team pages that don’t reply but a shifted strategy sees huge growth. But, if we want both acquire and retain, trying to understand whether the tactic is useful to replicate and iterate should make us not ask why they reply, but to whom is it that they’re replying?
Looking at the amount of followers the pages that these teams are replying to therefore becomes important.
Dallas Fuel reply to fans. A lot of fans. The average followers of the pages they respond to is 65K, which is 126K less than the average. 77.7% of their replies are sent to accounts with fewer than 1000 followers. But only 42% of their replies are to unique users. The Fuel page is replying multiple times to pages with very few followers.
According to Sprinklr data, “The top performers in customer care on Twitter respond back to Tweets three times faster and respond to eight times more Tweets than others despite receiving ten times more incoming Tweets.”
Meanwhile, according to a Neustar and Twitter study, “research has shown that, at the high range, just a 10% rise in conversation has led up to a 3% increase in sales volume.”
There are two reasons to reply: to acquire and to retain. Even if esports teams aren’t ready to create a completed organic growth loop, there is no reason for the likes of TSM FTX, eUnited, Houston Outlaws and Dallas Fuel to be disparaged that they’re not gaining followers as fast as Fluxo or Wave. There’s every reason to believe that replying to fans — a lot of different fans — will cause retention when the time becomes sweet for monetisation.
Within the stage previous to retention, though, you have these four mentioned teams growing and replying. Fluxo reply to pages with an average of 182K followers and 31% of replies are to unique pages. Wave reply to those with 510K and 33% are unique. Giants reply to those with 127K, 59% are unique. Team Secret are replying to pages with 227K and 43% are unique.
Organic marketing is like the dark arts. Skewing your content output to find your brand in front of new eyeballs, especially on Twitter, comes down to using topic keywords, creating ephemeral and ubiquitous shareable posts, cross-platform promotion and so much more than opening up an Ad Campaigns tool.
Another way to lead into acquisition: replying. Brand networking by association is easy, really. Just reply to the pages whose followers you want for yourself. But, from the fast growth of the likes of Fluxo to the stagnation of a team focusing more on retention like TSM FTX, one comparison is apparent. Fluxo reply a lot, but to very few.
A larger conclusion we can make is that the future of esports lifestyle is borne by celebrity esports stars. Fluxo, who were founded in January of 2021, is the fastest-growing esports organisation in the world and Nobru, their player and founder, has a hugely engaged Twitter following even away from his favoured platform, Instagram. Fluxo use 17% of their replies to their founder.
How do we learn from these replies?
Fluxo, Wave, even Fuel when replying tolarger pages, focus on a smaller network and reply more frequently. Given that they each have one main game, it’s unsurprising to lean on a condensed network. But questions arise for teams with a multi-game approach as an organisation: should they spread thin and reply often but to many sub-networks? Or, rather, should multi-game esports organisations find smaller networks in each of their games and reply to those pages with a higher frequency?
Evidenced by their League of Legends page being in the top 10 highest replying 100K+ pages, Team Liquid are a standout organisation who have split their Twitter approach into different pages. Each other pages averages around 40% of their tweets being replies with their Brasilian page and Counter-Strike page specifically growing at over 10%.
Some organisations have found out ways to become profitable already. It’s not many. But, for now, if we hypothesise that the route to profitability as an esports team entity is to have a growing and retained fanbase, could we deny that Team Liquid’s approach, of splitting their growth networks won’t provide more value? They can grow these pages rapidly with a concise organic network till there’s need for more careful retention like with their League of Legends page.
Although not on par with the sharp rise of Fluxo or Wave, Sentinels or Karmine Corp, their pages offer a better promise of consistent (if not personal) connection and thus a clear reason to suggest guaranteed engagement to potential advertisers.
There’s plenty that can be said about the franchised leagues in Call of Duty and Overwatch requiring a separately named team of entering organisations. But it forced the involved organisations to create dedicated communications positions, staff who are more readied to acquire, retain, reply. Alongside the growth of single-team organisations in other games, it’s inspired multi-game organisations to disaggregate resources into more dedicated pockets.
Even if none of them get to a point of decent profit, the real winners from that are the fans.
