TRAFFIC & STRATEGY
of people visit for other reasons and might become engaged with your forum. So there’ s more exposure.”
Nevertheless, Walker highlights one particular challenge with the platform – its lack of automatic moderation, which video-based channels like YouTube typically provide. He suggests that affiliates closely monitor their communities to limit spam and inappropriate behaviour.
Having launched the forum only recently, Walker is still experimenting with content strategies, posting everything from welcome introductions to discussion prompts on live marble races. Right now, his main priority is converting existing audiences into active Redditors.“ Advertising the community using other platforms is the key. I’ ve put the link to the subreddit on the website, LinkedIn, YouTube and in my newsletters,” he says.“ I’ m getting members signing up to the channel. Hopefully, when people start to respond more, it will gather momentum and snowball from there.”
WhatsApp & Telegram for player retention
Marc Samouilhan, director of affiliate agency Global Ad Ventures, has been in the African iGaming space for nine years, managing around 20 websites across 15 countries. He started the business by“ following the standard affiliate playbook”, launching websites and pulling in traffic, an approach he says has been working great.
“ However, we have also been building our own communities of users on various channels, most notably WhatsApp and Telegram,” he adds.“ These channels form part of our main strategy, which is to de-risk from SERP changes, enable us to promote multiple operators to the same users, assist with player retention and build our own brands to future-proof as much as possible.”
Samouilhan explains that his approach is“ text-based before video” rather than prioritising text-based social media, as he is still working on launching TikTok and YouTube channels later in the year.
“ We went this route as I’ m a big fan of automation and we found it easier to automate the content creation for our text-based channels than video. We were able to reuse and repackage the web content we had into content, which meant no additional resources were needed,” he says.
However, Samouilhan emphasises that automated content should only form the base of text-heavy channels. Frequent polls, quizzes and competitions are equally important to encourage engagement.
When choosing a channel, Samouilhan suggests that affiliates be aware of user preference variations across markets. For instance, compared to Europe and the US, where Discord is widely used in the iGaming community, the platform doesn’ t enjoy the same popularity in African countries. Samouilhan’ s main channels are Telegram, WhatsApp and SMS, though he has also had moderate success with Facebook and X.
“ But I think affiliates can overthink this aspect and try to do a deep dive into the unique aspects of the market like cultural differences – this leads to analysis paralysis. The best way to find out what players want is to launch and get feedback,” he adds.
To better monitor channel performance, Samouilhan has designed analytic tools to help guide content optimisation and message timing based on users’ engagement patterns.
“ Some markets require slight changes. For example, in South Africa, we might promote the Premier Soccer
League( PSL) more as it is extremely popular. In Kenya, we might promote jackpots more, and in Nigeria, we might promote more virtual games.”
Nevertheless, Samouilhan reminds affiliates to be careful when managing their channels, noting that WhatsApp frequently suspends accounts featuring gambling content. While Telegram is more open, caution is still needed to ensure account safety.
DIY forum: The Mr Gamble approach
An affiliate with just six years of history, Mr Gamble is relatively new in the industry. In July 2023, it launched a forum within its website – an approach usually only adopted by long-established brands such as AskGamblers and Wizard of Vegas.
Yet, the forum is performing surprisingly well. According to CMO Paul Puolakka, it saw significant growth last year with a 387 % increase in topics and a 1,054 % growth in post count; The current total user number has reached around 12,000.
Like many affiliates, Mr Gamble started with an SEO-driven site, in addition to providing live streams on Twitch and slot reviews on YouTube. Although Twitch has chat features, Puolakka noticed that user feedback“ can easily get lost in the live chat”.
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