Lord of the Rings Online is a pretty popular MMO thanks in part to the hard-core Tolkien fanbase. Recently, LOTRO has been nominated by fans on Guild Launch for the Dragon Slayer awards. They are up for top community management team.
Community management is an important aspect of any game business, because the whole basis of profits rely on having a fanbase. The right management team for the community can make or break your game.
Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at what makes up LOTRO’s community management team.
Twitter could potentially be a hard social media community to tackle given that how many characters in each tweet is restricted. Also take in the fact that often, it is suggested for businesses to keep tweets approximately 20 characters below the maximum amount to allow followers and fans the ability to retweet or quote posts easily without cutting off anything important.
LOTRO’s Twitter account has successfully created an environment where fans can easily interact with their LOTRO Twitter team for support, questions, updates, and more. They are constantly replying to questions, problems, and tweets by their fans.
They also make sure to utilize hashtags, and in particular their own brand: #LOTRO. Not only do they apply this hashtag to almost all of their own updates (excluding comments), but the team also keeps an eye on who else is using this hashtag and attempts to reply to any questions fans put with the tag that their Twitter handle might not be attached to.
Additionally, they also link YouTube video Updates to their tweets, which not only engages on a more personal level, but also draws people to the other communities they offer.
Forums
The forums just received an update today (August 1st), and are officially listed on the main website. They have a pleasant interface with logical categories covering just about ever aspect of the game: game play, RPG, technical and other support, updates, and more. Unlike some of the other platforms, the forums really allows for more fan engagement and also fan-to-fan engagement also.
Facebook & Google+
Like their Twitter account, the LOTRO Facebook page and Google+ page is especially dedicated to updates on the community, game, and trouble shooting any technical problems. Unlike Twitter, it has the potential for more engagement and longer updates. LOTRO capitalizes its status updates by including images and videos.
They also post important news, like server restarts, in multiple languages. Lastly, the Facebook management team also makes sure there are links back to all the other communities.
At the end of the day, when you are settling in your Hobbit house for the night, LOTRO does a great job of covering news, updates, support, and engagement on multiple fan communities.
