Anne Steinhaus's blog

To follow up on my last post, I decided to take a look at how men and women use social notifications on our platform. For the uninitiated, notifications come in three flavors:

●     Invites, which are sent from one user to another, encouraging new users to come play the game
●     Messages, also sent from one user to another, often used for sending gifts or other specific items
●     Activities, which are posted to a users’ wall or other social feed, highlighting an achievement, mission accomplished, level-up, etc.

Looking at behavior over the past 6 months, activities by far are the most utilized form of social sharing on the Viximo platform. Nearly twice as many people have posted an activity than have sent an invite. That doesn’t mean that activities are more efficient for viral growth; the conversion rates from invites and messages are higher than from activities. In other words, users are more likely to click on a private message from a friend, rather than an activity post that is likely to get lost in their social feed.

What about gender differences? On average, men on our platform are 10% more likely to post activities to their social feeds. Women, on the other hand, are nearly 20% more likely than males to send invites. They also tend to invite more friends (22 on average, vs. 18 for men). Both genders are equally likely to send messages, but women send nearly 50% more messages per user.

Is it any surprise that guys like to blast their entire friend group with posts about their accomplishments within social games, while gals prefer one-on-one interactions? Maybe not. But considering the long-held stereotype that social games are made for bored housewives, I wasn’t expecting men to be big social sharers when it comes to game activity (at least not publicly).

Notifications are an important component of social game play (they put the “social” in social gaming). Obviously, they are key to growing your user base, but can also contribute to retention. It can be a challenge for both game developers and social networks to make the most of viral channels. Knowing how men and women use different types of notifications can be a key part of the optimization process. After all, viral channels are free, and who doesn’t want to reduce their marketing costs?

Anyone else out there surprised by these results? ...

Now that social games have evolved past simple farming games to a full-fledged multibillion dollar industry, does anyone still believe that the typical social gamer is a 43-year-old woman? While most of the initial games on Facebook appealed to this demographic, social game content has grown in both volume and variety. Sure, there are still a lot of clones out there - look at the sheer number of farming games - but new genres and game mechanics have emerged that pull in a much wider audience.

To demonstrate this, I took a look at three of the most popular games across the Viximo network, focusing on gender.

GAME 1 - Big Business. This graph is probably what we would typically associate with a social game. Females account for about 60% of the users, views, and revenue for the game across our network:

GAME 2 - Ravenwood Fair. This game, deployed on similar sites as Big Business, has a slightly different pattern. Males make up half of the audience, but are much less engaged and certainly don’t monetize as well as females:

GAME 3 - Backyard Monsters. On the other end of the spectrum, this game blows the whole “housewives are the only ones playing social games” theory completely out of the water.

As these data show, social games aren't just for women in their 30's (despite what your core gamer friends might have you believe). As with traditional games, social games can appeal to many different demographic groups by providing carefully tailored content and functionality. Each segment of users has different - and potentially advantageous - usage habits and spending patterns. This is where Viximo comes in.

As a social game distributor, we use a game’s demographic data (among other things) to inform our approach to advertising, cross-promotion, community messaging, sales and incentives, and more. Making a great game is a big part of success, but getting it into the hands of the right users is even more important. ...

Read an interview with Viximo's CEO

Wondering what the opportunity is for social game developers beyond Facebook? Our CEO, Dale Strang, sat down with Gamasutra to enlighten them on the subject. Some of the highlights:

• Many developers either think the off-Facebook opportunity isn't there, or is too difficult to take advantage of.
• While Facebook may be the single dominant global player, there are a number of high-quality, regionally targeted social networks with engaged audiences across the globe.
• Understanding these markets can be a difficult task for developers (this is where Viximo comes in).