EA: Facebook is a "lifeline" for Battlefield 4 promotion

Part of launching a game these days is promoting them; getting the word out to as many players as possible. And part of that promotion is being on social media. In an interview with [a]list daily, EA Senior Online Marketing Manager Daniel Lingen explains where the company focuses its social media muscle.

"We have specific goals that we set across the different channels," says Lingen. "I think one of the ones that we find really important and kind of like a lifeline for us is Facebook. Obviously we leverage the other channels but Facebook we rely heavily on to do a lot of our metrics-tracking and our analytics. Facebook has a lot of really great Insights that you can use to find out more about your team."

Lingen says EA breaks its Facebook activities into three core pillars: awareness, engagement, or conversion.

"We use those three pillars, which are three distinct pillars that we can set up within Facebook analytics, and we use that to define what the post schedule will look like over the course of a week," he explains. "We're not always looking at just one post, we're not looking at promoting a certain trailer or pre-order message, we're looking at how we can mix up our [user-generated content], our interactive posts, any of the content that we are releasing with Electronic Arts. We look at how we can leverage all that into one cohesive, multi-channel story. That works with Facebook leading the way."

Lingein also says that with Battlefield 4 out at retail, his team's vision has shifted towards bringing BF4 players to the front of promotion.

"So now that we've launched, a lot of our focus goes into, well, what are our fans doing? We are promoting what they are doing within our channels," he says. "I think a really good example is our 'Only in Battlefield' campaign, which had started by us creating a bunch of "moments" that had happened organically during play-tests, by creating these videos and kind of showing of these fan stories. We did enable our fans to create their own 'Only in Battlefield' moments during the beta, but once the game had launched, some of the things we're seeing were just far beyond anything we could have imagined. So as we move into post-launch, a lot of our focus becomes celebrating the awesome things that our fans do."

Check out the rest of the interview at our sister site the [a]list daily.