Zynga knew they had the makings of a hit on their hands when they released Vampire Wars as a Facebook social game.

The only problem: growth on their social channels remained stagnant almost six months after the game’s release.

Once I was hired, I broke the problem down into its component pieces.

If our channels wouldn’t grow, then there were a handful of plausible explanations. I addressed each potential concern, in sequence, until a solution was found.

First, I had to make sure our content matched our audience’s taste. I noticed that we had been communicating with our players in one of two ways: a.) generically, motivated by the idea that we could appeal to everyone or b.) as Zynga players, but not specifically as players of Vampire Wars. I changed that and made sure that the language we employed from that point forward was customized to the experience of our players.

Then, we had to get consistent. Our outreach was infrequent and unpredictable, so I established a new publishing calendar that prioritized consistency, giving players a posting schedule they could rely on. It also emphasized frequency, which increased our visibility further.

The cohesion of our content needed improvement, as well. I worked with a talented team of artists to extend the game’s brand identity to its social channels, creating a sense of uniformity between the in-game experience and our other engagement platforms (e.g.: email, blogs, forums).

With these principles addressed, I began to improve the overall quality of our approach. Up to that point, we had primarily relied on written communication to connect with our audience. I expanded that, moving us to a more multimedia content strategy aimed at reinvigorating our community.

I was confident that my approach would “fix” our community resulting in more promising engagement and retention metrics. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how fast the turnaround was.

We had a goal to increase our Facebook followers by 10x over the course of six months. We more than doubled that, months before the self-imposed deadline. Traffic also picked up across all our channels.

In just a few weeks, our community went from being “dead” to quite lively indeed.