🗣️Community Hub
Creating a home from your community
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Introduction
Every product on Steam has its own unique Community Hub. By default, a game's Community Hub is set live when your game release state is set to "Coming Soon".
It's through the Community Hub you will communicate with your clients and includes numerous channels to do so. In general, your Community Management team should treat the Community Hub as the root of your community. This is generally the first contact you will make with a community member and very often the only channel of contact you will have with most users.
Quick Start
The community hub isn't visible until you have set your game to "Coming Soon" You can do this in the Steam Developer Portal once you have completed your Store Presence checklist and been reviewed.
Features
Announcements
The first and most commonly used feature is Steam Announcements. The most recent announcements are displayed on your Store Page as well so take care when crafting them and understand that an announcement is 100% a marketing tool. Through the News tab in the Community Hub players can review all of your announcements along with any syndicated news about your product. Use Announcements to alert your community to significant events like patches, new releases, events and more. Each announcement can be rated and includes a thread of comments.
Forums
A classic forum where you and your customers can openly communicate. You will find this is a common place for users to come for 1st level support, to ask pre-sales questions and to of course a first stop for supporters to cheer you on ... and detractors to chew you out. It's very important to manage and moderate your forums well as the forum history helps set the tone of conversation for new and returning users. Users access your forums through the Discussions tab in the Community Hub. You can create various channels and groupings to organize the forum and can promote team members as moderators.
Streams
Steam is a streaming tool and platform that requires no additional tools or setup. Your players can easily stream themselves playing and you can host or promote streams of your own to be featured on your storefront. Streams in correlation with key events can be a powerful way to engage and build your community and being Steam it's all highly integrated with your storefront and other Steam features. Users can access a list of all available streams of your game from the Broadcast tab.
Group Chat
Group Chat is as its name suggests a chat (text and voice) for your game. The feature is underutilized owing largely to how hidden it is. "Group Chat" can be joined from 1 small hyperlink on your Community Hub All (home) page located in the upper right of the screen. The feature is part of Steam's "Friend Chat" and has been recently updated. Technically the feature is also available in the Steam API meaning you could show your game's "Group Chat" in the game sadly Valve has not updated the Steam API to use the new Friend Chat system so the "Group Chat" you see in the game is separate from the one you see in the Steam client never the less it is useful in-game as a "Global Chat" in some use cases and useful in Steam client for some communities in particular games with a real-time social element.
Videos
Users can link content they have uploaded to their YouTube channels for your game and it will appear in the Videos tab. This can be quite useful for finding reviews of your game right from the Steam Community Hub. Make sure your marketing team is aware of this feature if you use an "influencer" style marketing approach it would be important to insure any related videos are also linked in your Community Hub.
To upload videos you need to open Steam and select Content under your profile ... that is click your name as it appears in the main menu and select Content
From there, select Video and link your YouTube account, you should now be able to select and link videos as desired.
Guides
Players can create and publish guides for your game and find guides published by others (or yourself) through the Guides tab in the Community Hub.
Screenshots
Players can upload screenshots and will be invited to do so at the end of every game session where a screenshot was taken. Screenshots appear in the Screenshot tab
Artwork
Players are free to upload all manner of things from cosplay to drawings and memes. The only requirement from Valve is that the content is remotely related to the game it's tagged to.
Workshop
If you have enabled Workshop for your game the Community Hub will display a Workshop tab.
Reviews
Users can use the Reviews tab for a more complete and searchable view of your product reviews.
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