What is Nintendo and Audience?
Nintendo or more specifically Nintendo of America, is an entertainment company that specializes in the video game markets, both relying on sales and success of their games and related merchandise from their IPs. In fact it is a leading brand within the video game market. Therefore, their social media is structured to promote their success and sales of their digital and physical products to their wide range of an audience. As their audience is marketed to all age groups, leaning towards a majority of family-friendly content for most products, their social media is not inhibited by age groups. For their young audiences on social media, for individual adults, or for the parents of young consumers who do not access social media, their social media content is applicable to these types of consumers.
Overall Brand Voice
In order to make their social media content reflect their brand in their products, Nintendo of America's social media stands to come off as friendly, approachable, but informative. Oftentimes, posts would be light hearted or welcoming their audience to the product, but making sure to convey information that would inform the audience or promote one of their products. Most of their content upholds their light tone to maintain a happy approach to their communications to their audience. This can even be been in their videos, especially their Youtube promotional videos, as the voice overs frequently keep a joyful or excited tone with their worlds and pitch. Nintendo aims to keep their fun yet professional attitude to approach to their younger audiences without alienating older audiences.
Nintendo strives to both stay connected with their loyal fans and customers on their social media with updates and events, but also uses their social media to appeal to their wide range of a customer base as a whole. Their social media cultivates positive communication to their audience.
Their main approach to Twitter appears to be their main social media account to pertain to their full audience. From having posts that appeal to general consumers, hardcore fans, and engaged gamers, they have a wider range with the content their posts take for Twitter.
1 Updates to Games
A frequent style of post includes updating their consumers about games already released. These updates inform the audience about changes or enjoyments of the game which target's their audience that is looking forward to more of a game or those who already are playing it. These posts aim at keeping their products fresh for consumers and maintain advertising for these products.
Although these types of boosts are able to both be effective advertising for their indiviudal products, as well as in maintaining fanbases and communities to their social media, it is not the best method of post or engagement to the community. It most exists as an informative post to their audience, as their Twitter audience has general appeal to all forms of their social media audience, this acts as an effective information communicating tool. Yet the problem with these types of posts is that they are only sub par in success, gain average amount of engagement, and have little room for developing further engagement opportunities with the community.
2 Calls for Participation
There are few examples of posts that Nintendo does to approach their audience and call for engagement. They actively ask for participation of their community in cases like this post for being engaged in an event or presentation. In this post, they are specifically calling the attention of any member of their audience to register to play test an upcoming game.
This post achieves engagement and applause slightly more than the average most likely due to the urgency and context of the game being upcoming. However these posts still maintain near average success, and Twitter is a specifically effective choice to posts these types of Calls to Action as their general Twitter audience is able to drawn in a wide range of interested members. However an issue with this type of post is that it doesn't necessarily appeal to most of their core audiences which mostly keeps these posts infrequent to be as most effective as possible.
3 Niche Events for Gamers
Other forms of engagement they approach their audience with are exclusive events or temporary events in games to their audience. Although these posts tend to be stylized in their text to be approachable to their audience, they are specifically for their consumer audiences who play the game. The post generally serves to inform this niche part of their audience and call for their participation in a game related event.
This both acts similarly to their general Game Updates posts, but these specifically target their specific game audiences. This post does not do well to the general audiences and are not as effective as advertising for their game as the Game Updates are. These event posts are entirely reliant on specific consumers who are actively playing the game and looking for events to engage in. This post reaches alot of their audience, yet does not encourage much engagement from most of their audience, as shown by the difference between the 100K+ views the video receives in comparison to the less than 3K likes the post gained.
4 New Upcoming Games + Poll
When Nintendo announces or posts about upcoming games, or especially massively keystone game products for their larger IPs, these posts tend to be able to draw extensive amounts of attention and engagement to their social media. Nintendo even uses this opportunity to spur more engaging actions within the comments of the post such as this post having examples of Nintendo trying to activate a discussing with their audience. The extensive success of these posts for having little to the post itself proves the importance of context for gaming related social media posts. Most of their social media success branches on how massively appealing or successful their franchise is and how new and expected an upcoming game for it they are advertising is. The importance, appeal, and success of these types of posts can be evident in the amount of applause being more than 4x as effective in likes recieved for the post than the average.
Although this type of post would not appeal to niche audiences or uninterested audiences, it does draw in possible consumers and their core gaming audiences for this. Because of the massive attention a post like this receives and draws in, they then try to engage the large audience drawn with the provoking of interaction in the comment thread below the post through their ask for a response. Although this type of poll engagement does make an attempt at pulling in engaging audience members, it shouldn't be reserved for successful posts like this. If Nintendo made more posts of polls and similar standalone audience engaging posts within the comments as the secondary post, then they would be find themselves able to create more community and consumer engaging social media more frequently without needing to rely on an anticipated product release.
5 Gameplay Video and Demo
One of their second most popular types of posts feature specifically videos of upcoming products instead of just a general announcement of such. These posts mainly stand as advertising for an upcoming release and being able to effectively showcasing their products to their general audience. Although the context of the game presented still will rely on niche audiences and fans, its video format spurs the possibility of spreading the appeal of the product to newcomer audiences, which makes these posts better forms of advertisement than engagement.
This specific post however is different from most other gameplay video posts, as it also announces a demo for the game itself to draw the audience to engage with the demo of the product. The demo does mainly survive as further advertising for fans and newcomer audiences, it also does further engage the audience of the product through the social media. The comments of the post hold better potential to discuss the product more and create a more engaged viewer audience to the context within the post. Although not much is done by Nintendo's part to actively promote discussion or engagement of the audience about the demo they set as available.
With their Twitter being more of a general audience social media, they make different types of posts to different forms of consumers and levels of investment specific audiences may have with products. However this does not excuse the infrequent levels of engagement that Nintendo has with their audience, as with how varying and wide reaching their Twitter's audience is, Nintendo should more frequently create posts that actively call for engagement with their audience. They seldom do make calls for discussion or polling with their audiences, yet it most of the time are not individally posted or visible to their full Twitter audience, or do not use the proper engagement tools such as Twitter's polling feature for these types of posts.
Although Nintendo's Facebook remains as a semi-main social media for their audience, it is more deliberately targeted towards looking consumers and consumers who would be waiting for specific opportunities to purchase a product.
1 Community Engagement
Compared to Nintendo's Twitter, their Facebook holds more frequent cases of promoting discussions amongst their community within the comments of the post. These discussions typically are formatted as asking for a responding audience member to answer a question proposed to the viewer, with the added understanding that it is more for the community members to discuss amongst each other instead of with Nintendo itself. Although a signigicant amount of engagement is drawn, as the amount of comments being more than 50% of the amount of applause the post received, this basic level of drawing in community engagement shouldn't be the only main example of Nintendo's fan interaction on Facebook. There are more opportunities or types of posts available that Nintendo could make that would be able to have a greater case of engagement with their audience.
2 Physical Item Sale
Their Facebook's audience type is more displayed in the frequency of physical product or commerce type posts they make on Twitter. Announcing new merchandise or discussing explanations of certain delays to a physical products release is more commonly seen on Facebook when compared to their other social medias. These types of post also generally recieve the average amount of response and applause as normal with their Facebook posts, which is able to double this display as an effective enough advertisement as well for their audience as the video itself showcases the product. These posts however do not offer much in terms of engagement with their audience other than keeping the general attention and anticipation for a specific product.
3 Digital Sales
What occurs more frequently on their Facebook however are small announcements of deals, sales, or digital commerce opportunities for Nintendo's products. Although these posts lack much content within the post itself, it generally is the most frequent informative type post their Facebook has which specifically targets their main Facebook audience. These posts also lack much engagement within the audience other than a viewer reacting to the sale in varying degrees of response, yet it does directly target the audience of consumers who would be searching for these types of sales and will be willing to make a purchase because of this post.
Although less aimed at a general appeal of all audience compared to their Twitter, Instagram for them holds most approachable ranges of their audience, as it both holds more cases of types of engagement with the community while still serving the general advertising purposes for their products, albeit with simpler tones.
1 Entertaining Engagement
Although more frequent in appearance alongside of holiday related posts, Nintendo would often make Instagram posts with the mixed purposes to advertise an upcoming game while creating an attempt at entertaining visual content to their audience. This purpose is additionally followed by prompts or implicit openness to their audience to be engaged with the media presented within the post displayed. With this Valentine's related post, Nintendo tries to appeal to the audience to engage with the Valentine's posts to share with with other potential audience members. This effect both creates light-hearted and natural engagements with the audience to use content presented by Nintendo (especially with Instagram's many and easy sharing features) as well as continues to act as a form of advertisement for their product for upcoming releases.
The more positive types of comments and community engagement of the audience to Nintendo are often found within the comment sections of these posts. However these posts do not necessarily do much to inform the viewer of content which limits the post in its effectivity as advertisement for their product.
2 Keystone Gameplay
Similar to Nintendo's Twitter posts of highly anticipated games, Instagram also gains high applause success with their community with a similar form of post. This type of post, similar to the Twitter equivalents, recieve many comments from the community who actively express their approval or excitement for the upcoming game. This not only spurs the effectiveness of the advertisement with the approval and shares amongst the community, but also drives the positive engagement of the audience outwardly commenting and discussing amongst other audience members about the incoming release.
As the audience is outwardly discussing the content within the comments, this post could have been the perfect opportunity for Nintndo to outwardly call for discussion and the thoughts of the community to spur the engagement with their own initiative, which could have made these opportunities cases to increase the engaging community of Nintendo's Instagram. Despite this, even though wasn't initally intended to draw engagement with the audience beyond advertising to their core gaming audience, the appearance of discussion and positive engagement shows the potential if Nintendo outwardly tried to incorporate more engagement behaviors.
3 Art Promotion Celebration
Another more common content made on their Instagram art more artistic poster like images made to either promote their products or celebrate an annual event such as an anniversary, event, or holiday. This often is done to provide visual content for the community to enjoy, which often has a secondary effect of the community appreciating the art from the comment section.
However this post itself spurs a more active approach to engaging with social media, as it not only introduces a hashtag for the community to share, add, and follow of #Kirby30, but also directs the audience to enjoy the content create with obtaining a downloaded version of the visual content provided. Although yet again, this activity on Nintendo's part of including engagement opportunities in their community is minimal, perpetuating and celebrating with the community through a hashtag is still a more stronger example of the cases of Nintendo's engagement.
Youtube
Nintendo's Youtube, although holds a context as being a main initial sources of information from Nintendo to its audiences, is still generally marketed to its most engaged and core audience members. As its content is more oriented as the first announces of more anticipated reveals or comprehensive showcases of gaming products, its core gaming audiences are the main groups targeted through their Youtube to generate future consumers.
1 Current Game Update
Similar to the minor Current Game Event and Updates on twitter, these updates retrieve the similar niche attention that draws in audiences to the video. These posts are a very frequent type of content on Nintendo's Youtube, and often is made to advertise for their products and maintain their players attention to their games. When compared to their other social medias such as their Twitter for similar styles of posts, these posts on Youtube perform similarly well to their Twitter counterparts.
Although at first this appears to be expected, the difference lies in the audiences presented, as Youtube's audience appeals more to Nintendo's core gaming and younger audiences while their Twitter is aimed at all forms of thier audience. With their Youtube having a smaller subscriber total than their Twitter and more focused target audience, one would expect this content to hold significantly less numbers of success than Twitter, yet despite this, the amount of views and likes nearly match the same applause the Twitter Video Updates receive. Although this content is showcased to a less wide range of audience, it still performs dynamically well and even proportionally better with the target niche audiences on Youtube.
2 Nintendo Direct Community Event
One of Nintendo's overall largest events they hold for their audiences, and one of the more anticipated events for all types of audiences, are their Nintendo Directs they stream live on thier Youtube channel. For these posts, there exists both high anticipated context behind the success of these videos (as they are normally announced prior and always expected to have first seen product releases) as well as better engagement with their audiences.
The video being streamed holds the most clear example of Nintendo's form of professional yet fun brand voice, and they deliver this voice through the communication to their audience. Between product reveals, Nintendo talks with the pretense of reporting directly and personally to the viewers of the video. Alongside the presentations additionally, they hold open Youtube Live Chats alongside the streaming video, which the community will gather in and comment and talk amongst each other as the video is streamed.
Although this may still be another example of Nintendo's version of engagement being only from them to the audience and lacks back and forth, it still creates community spaces that audience members often communicate with each other in. These spaces often cultivate anticipation, positive enjoyment, and discussions live during these video streams. Which may be enough to not only state these videos as successful product announcements, but creations of engaging digital spaces.
3 Keystone/Indie Game Videos
The majority of the rest of Nintendo's Youtube context are videos solely and individually focused on gaming releases, both keystone and highly anticipated or indie announcements. However in comparison to their other social media counterparts to revealing games through videos, and more specifically their similar posts made on Instagram, Youtube is the prime social media used for these forms of product reveals. The sheer vast amount of views and applause outshine most over versions of their other social media's attempt at the same showcases, even succeeding in more than double in these regards.
In contrast, it does little in bringing about engagement within the comments or in interacting, however it still shines as the more successful media posts Nintendo makes on nearly all of their social media.
Styles of Commerce
Real Time Marketing
With the style of products video game companies often produce, most of their market is always changing. Although most of its approaches often have similar means, the content, product, and context of what they are trying to sell to their audience is always changing. As for Nintendo, their social media context is specifically focused and shaped to their upcoming releases, sudden sales, or events. Their Nintendo Direct streaming videos are also unique in its form of marketing, as it announces products and games for all games on their current Nintendo platform. Which means in Nintendo Direct, that they are just as often announcing products for other gaming companies via their console, as they are announcing their own video game products. Their social media posts that reflect or detail anniversaries or incoming events are also considered Real Time Marketing, despite them typically being events planned in events, it still are time based. The most evident cases of Real Time Marketing within their own products or another company's product on their console, are their Current Game Updates and Event based posts. The post analyzed as a Current Game Event post in Twitter for Monster Hunter, is a post detailing the event in a game not run by Nintendo. Monster Hunter is a game updated and made by Capcom, so Nintendo has to market these events and products since it is under their video game consoles. This form of advertisement always keeps their social media relevant to their most updated or new products and content. Nintendo's style of Real Time Marketing does not use more obvious means of newsjacking, but it is still able to create social media posts based off of another company's product due via their game systems causing a direct connect, making their RTM more implicit and integrated.
Improving Engagement
What Nintendo lacks the most of is proper and direct efforts of engagement to and with their audiences. Although some of their posting styles do spur the community to engage with the content, the community normally has to only engage with each other or only at Nintendo via the comment sections of posts. This might create some sense of social media community, it is not a direct engagement of the Nintendo itself with the audience. Any form of engagement noted with Nintendo's social media is mainly implicit and relies on the community's own (and mostly unprovoked) willingness to engage with each other. Additionally, the any further attempts at engagement also rely heavily on upcoming releases and are not regularly presented to the audience as part of their normal styles of posts.
Moving forward, Nintendo would need to incorporate more different and direct forms of fan interaction and engagement strategies, but also push for their engagement to not always require there to be a highly anticipated upcoming release. Especially with how versatile and varied Nintendo's social media audiences are, they would be able to vastly develop their engagement if more effort was involved with their audience engagement strategies. Beyond using just comments of posts or live chat features, Nintendo should utilize other unique features that their social medias can post. From utilizing polls and creating more interactive content, Nintendo would be able to boost their engagement with the audience while keeping their required professional brand and tone. It is understandable that fan conversation and live communication with the audience is normally not included with Nintendo's social media, as it may endanger the professional and family-friendly brand and voice Nintendo maintains, there are still more types of engagement strategies that would be harmless to their brand and easy to implement.
Approches to Levels of Consumers
There are four main types of consumers, in the sense on the consumer's level of commerce for a product: New Customers, Anticipating Customers, Experiencing Customers, and Awaiting Customers. Despite
- New Customers are the types of audiences who have not purchased a specific game product that Nintendo is selling, or are generally looking for a purchase to make for a product. Posts that normally offer new sales or reveal new products, such as first game announcements, normally draw in this early level of consumer. Plenty of the posts made by Nintendo typically correspond to these forms of consumers, espcially with flashy videos presented for the first time in large events, as posts made to draw in this crowd attempt at displaying this content to as much of its audience as possible.
- Anticipating Customers are types of audiences who are already expecting an upcoming game and are looking for more details to certify their future purchase. Although similar to New Customers, Anticipating Customers are those who either know more context behind an IP or product, or need more convincing in order to purchase a game from Nintendo. Videos and posts made for an upcoming game until the release are directly aimed towards this consumer type. This is especially apparent with most of upcoming game promotion are gameplay videos, that with each iteration or video for a specific game, gradually displays more and more detail and features of the game product. This makes the Anticipating Customers a more active participant and consumer on Nintendo's social media, as they are both tend to enthusiastically engage with the social media posts, as well as continually view and monitor Nintendo's social media content with hopes of being able to be shown more new content. Additionally a subtype of this consumer group may also include the more deal-searching audiences. This subtype of an Anticipating Customer might already be interested in a product, but will only be willing to become a consumer if a sale or deal emerges, which posts that typically advertise these sales are aimed at these consumers. Sales and deals generally aim at all consumer types, and especially New and Anticipating Customers, but most product sale posts are aimed at Anticipating Customers as these posts would either fully rely on the context of the product e and expect the viewer to understand what's on sale, or the sale itself would be advertised as more exclusive and temporary, in order to quickly entice these consumers.
- Experiencing Customers are types of audiences who have purchased a product, are actively utilizing or enjoying the game product, and most likely searching for more that the product might offer. These customers typically are product users of the more current or recent games, which makes their development as a consumer of Nintendo products and of their social media critical within this stage. Nintendo often promotes to this type of consumer in their social media by posting content that either adds more features, current events, or updates to the game itself, or mention exclusive or future content for said game to maintain the user's interest.
- Awaiting Customers are types of audiences who have purchased and (in their perspective) fully experienced the product. They might be willing to either move onto a new product or will only go back to utilizing a current product if prompted with new content. This consumer type typically are the oldest forms of consumers, or are fans of specific IPs and products that Nintendo has. Although they might passively consume Nintendo's social media content or other products, they only would specifically engage with Nintendo's social media or become Anticipating Customers again if Nintendo creates posts that refer to content they are searching for. This typically is expressed in the type of product that gets announced, which often be lumped in posts meant to draw in New Customers. But this type of fan typically are the repeating consumers Nintendo aims to consistently maintain and refresh their consumer cycle within Nintendo products.
Nintendo's less than perfect attempts at social media engagement, their approach to stylizing and creating the content (as well as the products themselves) for their posts are able to still make up for this lack of engagement and fully draw in these consumer types. For these consumer types, each are consistently appealed to evenly by both alternating between what type of post to make per social media, and evenly spreading out the content itself over time. This plan put in for using their posts to approach to their different types of consumers keeps a consistent level of each consumer as time continues.
Conclusion and Maturity
Nintendo's approach to their social media stands at a strange crossroads. Each social media performs at high success between their different audiences, types of consumers, and with maintaining their userbase. Nintendo keeps surefire success with its posts and social media while still keeping their desired brand voice and appeal. However, despite their success and consistent plan, there are few avenues of active engagement between the social media itself with the audience. The content of posts made and slight encouragements within specific posts do foster consumer to consumer interaction and community discussion within comments of posts, however a conversational or consumer to Nintendo relationship is often depicted as one-sided. Although this may be due to the desired clean and professional brand voice Nintendo upkeeps, there is still plenty of room for Nintendo's social media development to rethink and expand their fan engagement strategies within their social media. This change does not even need to be pivotal or drastic for Nintendo, as including a new style of post as simple as utilizing poll features that their social media would provide would create better engagement prompts for Nintendo. Their social media plan is assuredly rigid and maturely developed, and holds a professional consistency and frequency, yet it still has more room to develop its potential to create more connected engagement strategies for its audience. Nintendo's social media success is still consistently thriving with their post content always being able to rile audiences and maintain consumer interest, but there is more Nintendo can do with its audiences on social meida.
Credits:
https://www.instagram.com/nintendo/ https://twitter.com/NintendoAmerica https://www.facebook.com/Nintendo/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGIY_O-8vW4rfX98KlMkvRg https://wallpaperaccess.com/nintendo-switch