Fiene Ziegler’s Accidental Path from Cultural Studies to Player Community Management at InnoGames, Part 2

What are those KPIs and which are relevant for us? It really boils down to reach and engagement. These are the most important ones for us because we want players to interact and consume our content.—Fiene Ziegler

Last week, Player Driven’s Design Desk introduced InnoGames’ expert community management specialist Fiene Ziegler, and outlined how an admissions roadblock to law school in Germany in the late 2000s led her to major in cultural studies, which, in turn, led to her first paid gig in the video game industry.

Building on that foundation—which also reviewed the tools and processes that Ziegler and InnoGames have used to manage the global player communities associated with titles like Forge of Empires—we’ll conclude this week by traveling to the intersection of Ziegler’s and InnoGames’ social media, game promotion, and player retention strategies. As we’ll see, making sense of KPIs (key performance indicators) relating to player, and potential player, engagement with InnoGames’ lineup of games is at the heart of that effort.

Note: This profile is largely based on a podcast discussion between Ziegler and Player Driven founder and host, Greg Posner, that took place in late 2024; some aspects of that exchange have been updated or augmented in this post.

In the middle of their chat, Posner took a left turn to ask Ziegler the name of the last book she’d read.

“The last book?” Ziegler reiterated, surprised. “That's Iron Flame.”

Written by the American novelist Rebecca Yarros, Iron Flame is an adult romantic fantasy that debuted in 2023. Reviewers have described it as a steamy/spicy cross between Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games.

“I think it's more a book for the ladies, but it's great,” added Ziegler.

Posner also asked the name of a game she’s currently playing.

“I’m replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition,” answered Ziegler, without missing a bear. “Next week, The Veilguard comes out and, I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m a great BioWare fan.”

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a sequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition, which was indeed developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts in 4Q 2024.

Ziegler is remarkably consistent in her tastes. The books she reads, the games she plays, the games her employer makes, and the movies she watches—in last week’s post, she noted she rewatches The Lord of the Rings series every year—are all somewhere in the vicinity of fantasy, role-playing, action, and strategy.

Okay, let’s get to it!

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To Facebook, YouTube, Insta, Discord, TikTok, Infinity and Beyond

I also see now, more and more, gaming companies embracing TikTok.—Fiene Ziegler

Two major topics that Posner and Ziegler covered involved the evolution of her role—she’s been at Hamburg-based InnoGames for nine years and counting—and why she, and the rest of the community-focused team she works with, have increasingly embraced external social media platforms to get InnoGames’ messages out and to collect, review, and make use of player feedback.

“You started your original job in forums,” noted Posner. More recently, you’ve “expanded to…Discord and Reddit...Where do you see community, yourself, as being the primary place to be?”

“For me, personally, it's more on the social media side,” Ziegler responded. “It depends a bit on games, of course, but I think, during the course of the last year, I got really addicted to TikTok, I must say.”

“At first, I had trouble getting into it,” she continued, “but now I'm kind of, like, addicted to it, and doomscrolling sometimes. And especially when Baldur's Gate 3 came out, I was basically in the whole bubble, Baldur's Gate bubble, especially the Astarion bubble, because, at that time, I couldn't play the game because I was in Sweden working from abroad, and I forgot my gaming laptop.”

Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3 debuted in the second half of 2023 for PCs and consoles and was a monster hit that sold well through 2024.

“The only thing I could do was, basically, get information about the game from TikTok. That was the easiest source because the studio updated a lot there, but there were also so many people creating videos about the game. And this is when it really clicked it for me.”

“I'm like, 'Wow, gaming is going viral on a platform like TikTok. That is really cool to see,'” she added. “And I saw a lot of girls that said, 'Hey, I don't know what this is about but this looks cool. I'm going to play the game.' And I think this is great to see that a platform like TikTok where you wouldn't originally imagine it, can be a potential platform for organic growth.”

“Especially in a time of difficult marketing on Facebook or Instagram, this really struck me to see how it spiraled, and reached so many people that have nothing to do with gaming, but that got interested in it, especially women that are still kind of seen as, 'Oh yeah, you just play [The] Sims.'”

“That is something that I feel is a platform that has great potential,” Ziegler continued. “Of course, not every game is kind of, like, fit for it. Forge [of Empires], for example, is not necessarily a TikTok native, but I think for certain titles, it's definitely a cool platform to reach people outside of gaming to attract to your game.”

Posner’s next question shifted gears to creating content for social media platforms like TikTok.

“Let's talk about content creation, because that's a struggle I face on a daily basis,” he said. “How does your content creation journey or day begin?”

“I can say that it's not a fully-fledged process yet,” responded Ziegler, “because I'm still kind of exploring it. I got into social media, a lot, after I came back from my...sabbatical last year, where I really could disconnect and come back with fresh ideas. And then also being the whole Baldur's Gate bubble, I really was blooming with ideas.”

Left: Cover Art for Larian Studios' Baldur’s Gate 3. Right: Astarion Ancunín is a High Elf rouge character in the game, who can serve as the game's protagonist (and the character became popular on social media due to his intriguing sassiness…or vampiric sexiness?!).

“I'm also still doing a lot of trainings on social media and stuff,” Ziegler continued. “For now, what I have established for myself is that I do campaigns based on features or events we will have in the game. So, I basically check out how our release schedule is, and then I build campaigns around this.”

“Currently, I'm working on the Halloween campaigns for the event. This is basically looking at the event itself, what is new, what is interesting, what may be also from the beta we see… Where struggle points may be for players, where we could give more guidance also via social media, but also do fun content.”

“We also analyze the data from previous campaigns,” she added. “Check what worked well, what didn't work so well.”

Also, look at competitors naturally. What are they doing? What is working for them. Not necessarily only competitors but all kinds of channels. Like, I'm browsing also, privately, a lot of social media, always remind myself, “How can I use this for my daily work?”

“I'm a workaholic at heart,” confessed Ziegler. “I'm always kind of, like, checking, ‘Oh, is this something that we can use? Would this work with our community, with our channels?’ And then trying out stuff. See how it works. Iterate on it and, yeah, finding the right balance. We're currently in the middle of planning our strategy for the next year.”

“It's less content creation than actually preparing what kind of content you want to do because once you have the schedule, creating the actual content is easier, but I think creating the schedule is the most tiresome thing because you really need to think. You have only limited space, right? And limited formats. You really need to decide what is that you want to communicate, what would bring the most engagement, the most reach with your channel.”

“With social media, our first goal is to entertain our existing community. But we also want, of course, to go a bit beyond and try to still organically spread a bit of awareness of our game.”

For Ziegler, it’s about striking a balance “between entertaining your existing players and trying to reach new ones, and trying to find content that fits and looks good.”

“You said you're a workaholic and I feel like that's the lawyer” side of you, Posner said, grinning. “You still, just, kind of want to work all the time. What are those common metrics that that you take a look at?”

“The most common ones for us are reach and engagement,” she said, nodding. “How many players engaged with the content? How many did we reach? Then, also checking how many of those that we reached were followers, which are not followers.”

“It's different KPIs on every platform.”

Meta just recently changed their KPIs again. We now need to overhaul our whole reporting because nothing works anymore. It's always fun.

“It's also different,” she added. These indicators are called different things “between the different platforms because on YouTube, different KPIs are relevant. And for Meta. TikTok, again, has different KPIs.”

“It’s kind of like a juggling scene,” Posner interjected, “with, ‘Hey, what is my audience, and how do I reach them the best.’”

“Exactly,” agreed Ziegler. “For us, we are a game that is not super attractive on TikTok, unfortunately. We still post there because, if we have real content, we can just mirror it on TikTok. That's no effort on our side. We are definitely looking more into YouTube because we have a nice YouTube channel, but we have seen that we want to look into better ways to utilize it.”

“Facebook is our biggest channel still…We still post the regular content there, but we also focus more on Instagram. I would say, currently, it's more Instagram and YouTube that are the main focus for us, while still posting and supporting Facebook.”

The exchange suggested that Facebook has a deep pool of legacy gamers, but that base isn’t growing and may even be shrinking. YouTube and Instagram, conversely, appeared to have more momentum in the context of InnoGames’ slate of games in this timeframe (and this slate extends well beyond Forge of Empires, as we also noted last week).

A review of the Forge of Empires Facebook page showed it has about a million followers today, but, of course, the game itself is playable on Facebook. That makes it distinct from a much purer social media site/app like Discord on TikTok. On Discord, by the way, the Forge of Empires server has <90,000 members today.

That the KPIs made available by these diverse sites/apps would vary widely makes sense in this context, and even seemingly comparable KPIs could imply different actions should be taken, depending on the platform.

“I think the name of the game today across the industry is retaining your players, concluded Posner. Studios can retain “players by having a great community and…when they see cool content, they're going to want to come back to the game.”

Ziegler nodded in agreement.

“At the beginning of the year, I offered to help out our social media team because I wanted to gain more expertise on social media, and they were understaffed. I wanted to do way more for my game. And I saw that I needed to push it more actively from my side to see the results that I wanted to see there.”

“This has been working well so far,” Ziegler continued. “It's actually not temporary anymore at this point, because I'm getting more and more involved in all these social tasks, like, now also with the content calendar and stuff. This is now something that, most likely, will be pushed also more for the other [game] teams as well. Not sure how happy they are about it!”

“We reached so many players via social media,” she added. “The more we actually tailored our social media campaigns to really go, also, from a community management perspective, the more positive results we actually see. And I think this is proof that social media and community management doesn't need to be separated at all.”

“Do you have any reporting,” Posner asked, “that shows ‘Hey, when we released something on social media, that was great. We saw our daily active user spike,’ or something like that?”

“We have those trends but we cannot fully attribute it to social media,” Ziegler acknowledged. “We also send out newsletter campaigns, right? So, when a new feature or new event starts, then we also send out newsletter campaigns and stuff. And we also see it, really from activity levels, that players are most active when a new feature or event starts.”

The bottom line is that attribution is tough in a public environment with so many crosscurrents.

“We might have an influence on it, but we cannot prove that this is really the case, and that all the traffic really comes” from a social media push.

“We actually saw a positive impact, though, when we advertise our beta server. When something new hits our beta market—because this is usually something that is not so widely known to our community, that we have this market, and they [players] can test new stuff there—when we actually started advertising this on social media, we saw quite an increase compared to before we announced this, on activity levels on beta.”

Social media, Ziegler concluded, “has definitely an influence but it's very hard to prove correlation, cause…It's not like they're directly going into the game from our platform or social media platform.”

….unless you’re Facebook.

It’s interesting that the signal coming from social media was clear in a more obscure corner of the game environment. If effect, Ziegler and company ran an alpha/beta test on Forge of Empires beta testers, and they found that social media campaigns drove up those player numbers (if promoted/advertised on social media but not simultaneously pushed in a newsletter). This appears to be a technique that other studios could use to home in on the efficacy of their social media campaigns.

“Forge has been around for so long,” Posner noted. “You probably have…players that you know. You recognize these names, and I think there's just such a cool connection. And I think the player base feels that. They feel like, ‘Hey, they hear me, they know me, right? If I give feedback, I know they're listening.’”

“I remember customer service as being a thankless job at the end of the day,” he continued. “You do all this work, but you know, when players come back to the game and they keep doing what they're doing, it's like, ‘All right, I did something right.’”

“I'm not too close to the players currently,” Ziegler confessed. “As part of the coordinator role that we have, we are a little bit more detached from them. If time allows it, I'm lurking around Discord, and also answering there, and there I also have made myself a name.”

“Due to the busy schedules of Forge currently—we have a lot of stuff that is coming—I just don't have, currently, the time to regularly chat with them on Discord,” she said, “which is a pity because this is really fun to just directly engage with them.”

Posner shifted gears again to consider the tools she uses to make social media content.

“With the content creation side of the job, are you learning any tools like [Adobe] Premiere or [ByteDance] CapCut or any of those editing tools?” Posner asked.

“Yes,” Ziegler responded. “Premiere Pro definitely is a learning curve. Also, I work with [Adobe] Audition because I'm also doing voiceovers for some of the videos.”

“I'm now able to, basically, record my own video, edit it, and then put it into the video, which is kind of nice,” she continued. “I also use [Canva’s] Canva, basically, for social media content creation because, for me, that's easier than doing [Adobe] Photoshop or anything. It has such convenient features. But for video content, definitely Premiere Pro.”

At the end of their conversation, Posner thanked Ziegler and asked if he’d grilled her too hard with his questions.

“That was great,” she smiled. “It's all about learning for me. I have the feeling I'm constantly learning, and I'm always trying to expand my knowledge, not just work-related, but all kinds of knowledge because I'm just very curious. Sometimes I have a thought in my dreams and the next day, the first thing I do is open Google and check it out.”

“I'm always happy to get in touch with more people from the business, and also get to know what they're doing, their approaches.”

That’s a great mindset. We hope this case study of how InnoGames’ community management specialist Fiene Ziegler manages gamer communities and social media promotion inspires you to go learn something new, apply it professionally/personally test drive, and then share what you’ve found with someone who’ll appreciate it.