Social networks and gamification: the winning duo

Social networks have, in many ways, shaped the first quarter of the 21st century. From a fun novelty that captivated kids, college, and university students in the 2000s, to becoming one of the most hotly contested marketing battle grounds in the 2010s, to becoming the digital arenas in which elections and referendums can be lost and won. To the modern human being, social networks are where they get their news, where they go for diversion and fun in short spaces of time, and the space where brands go to find their audience, connect with their audience, and with effective engagement tools, grow their audience.

This is where gamification can be highly effective for brands looking to stand out and make an impact with their content and their messaging. Even publishers, news outlets, and educational institutions can benefit from using gamification in their social media campaigns.

Why? Because gamification is the most innovative and effective audience engagement tool available in the digital space.

The modern answer to audience engagement

The history of audience engagement is littered with methods that in the modern, hyper-connected world look about as fit for purpose as leeches in a hospital, and add as much value to the process of influencing customer actions as fax machines and overhead projectors do to the home office.

Think about someone standing on a soapbox and yelling in the street like a harbinger of the apocalypse. Whatever their message, they’re going to be a polarising presence at best. Think about someone dressed as a hamburger spinning a sign around that points to your restaurant. While it may be a fun, retro novelty for certain themed restaurants, it’s unable to sway the modern diner who will have a predetermined criteria for restaurants they visit on a whim, and will most of the time have planned in advance where they’ll dine.

To truly engage audiences today, you need to resist the cliche to “take it to the streets,” and instead, take it to the social networks. The silos and echo chambers people exist in online are what you need to penetrate to get your message to your audience. Because these spheres are so crowded, and so dominated by algorithms, you require more engaging, more interactive content.

Gamification taps into intrinsic motivations

Gamification is applying game mechanics to typically less game-like contexts to improve user engagement. Think about how hard people go in games. The stakes can be absolutely nothing except pride, but everybody wants to win and nobody wants to come up short, so to gamify something – to apply the right elements that get the whole 9 yards out of a user, is incredibly valuable.

Gamification strategies can be applied to numerous goals and objectives. You can gamify learning and education, to tap into the internal motivations of students to help them better engage with their programmes of study. You can gamify health, to help give people a structure of accountability and goal setting to make better decisions – give them a streak to protect, and drip-feed life hacks and pro-tips to educate and influence. You can gamify corporate training, to make professional learning an autonomous and more flexible business process.

While all gamification projects can benefit from, and in turn benefit any social media campaign, where social media and gamification really become tag team superstars is when it comes to marketing campaigns, both of a commercial nature, but also for the nonprofit sector. “Marketing games” is the technical term for gamification applied to the marketing sphere, and they are deployed with the aims of promoting brands, gathering user-data to grow mailing lists, and putting eyes on products and services in an attempt to incentivise purchasing and shorten the sales cycle.

Gamification within social networks

Gamification isn’t just a tool for businesses and organisations to use to deliver on their own goals. Gamification is a tool for social networks themselves to improve their service and keep their subscribers and members engaged on their own platforms. Without active members, social media networks lose relevance and fade away. Remember Bebo? Remember MySpace? TikTok essentially came out of nowhere with micro-form content, and influenced the offerings from Facebook, Instagram, and even Youtube, and over the coming years, new social media platforms will launch and further change the nature of how social networks operate.

As an example, the social network Facebook has already gamified one of its features called “Facebook Editor” to allow users to suggest changes. With a well-integrated ranking, progression levels, and badges, this tool allows Facebook to receive editing suggestions from its own users, which then allows the social network to improve the quality of its content. People from all over the world compete for merit badges and reach certain levels in order to earn virtual rewards, while Facebook continues to improve its user experience (UX).

The many benefits of gamified experiences

So why exactly should you be implementing gamification as part of your social media marketing strategy? What are the tangible benefits?

Gamified content offers a participatory experience

First of all, gamification encourages social network users to interact with your content rather than passively consume it. It’s not a static, albeit professional standard photograph with some copy or slogan, and post text with a “link in bio.” It’s not just a video either. It’s a piece of content that asks for input, offers to add value to their experience, and offers them potential excitement and rewards.

Everyone is carrying a digital video camera and editing software built into their smartphones that would put a top of top of the line home movie set up from the early 2000s to shame. The novelty of video and pro-level pictures has been wildly undermined from a marketing perspective by the fact that everyone is now capable of creating content of a reasonable level. That’s how TikTok and short-form content has become so big, and influencers have come into existence.

Gamified content breaks up the diet of media, and invites targeted customers on a journey. They speak the universal language of play, and can offer people a few minutes of interactive fun, or educate them about a product they’re considering. They’re impactful because they can be different, and can in turn distinguish your brand from the crowd.

Marketing games can create brand awareness and contribute to your brand image

By creating events and contests related to products and services, you can encourage people to interact with your products for longer, and finish experiences with an easy call to action (CTA) to incentivise a purchase. This could be as simple as linking them to the most appropriate item in your range through a customised Product Recommendation Quiz, or rewarding them for playing with a promotional code.

You can also use games to create positivity around your brand’s or business’s image. If part of the experience of doing business with your company involves experiential elements, and occasional rewards, you’re going to keep coming back, both when there are gamified promotions and otherwise, because the more good experiences a user has with a brand, the more they’re going to trust and favour the brand over others with less exciting, less engaging offerings.

Create shareable experiences by appealing to people’s competitive and social natures

The reason social networks exist is because they allow for social aspects like sharing. Your gamified approach to your social media marketing should ideally be piggy-backing on either your target audience’s motivation to compete, and advertise their achievement like a challenge or gauntlet to others, or your target audience’s social nature, and appetite for sharing and interactions.

To target the competitive aspect, you should allow users to share their results, and include features like leaderboards. To target the more social aspect, you could think about customising something like a Photo Contest or a Video Contest, as these ask users to submit their own media content (user-generated content), and vote on the entries of other players. This gives you as the game creator lots of additional material to share and further promote your marketing game.

The starting point for gamifying marketing on social media

Any gamification strategy aims to create a connection with the target audience to improve engagement.

To start with, you should assess the different networks where most of your audience spends their time, as there’s no point trying to engage your audience on social network X if they don’t use it as a demographic. For example, while the number of gen-Xers using Tiktok may be rising, demographically, the number is a lot lower than with gen-Zers. Age more than any other factor determines how your audience uses social networks, and what networks your audience will mostly use, as what it looked like and the function it served initially for millennials is very different to the experience of generation Z.

User engagement is always about the user experience

The user experience (UX) must remain at the heart of your thinking, and the content of the games you propose must remain coherent with your image, but they must also be adapted to the chosen platform and the habits most characteristic of its users.

Which game mechanics should I use?

There are many game mechanics you can take advantage of when creating your gamification projects. With a games creation platform like Drimify, this is simplified massively, as rather than building an experience from scratch, you can customise tried-and-tested game engines to your precise needs.

Some game engines will be more effective for targeting particular customer actions, and some will be more suited to certain target audiences than others. For example, mini sports games, like a Basketball – Free Throw Game or an Ice Hockey Game with a leaderboard function enabled would be great for encouraging sports fans to try and win a product being promoted by a sponsor, with every participant supplying an email address getting a promo code to incentivise purchasing.

As it literally takes a couple of minutes to play, and has the button to allow players to share their result, a lot of fans will engage with such a game if it comes up in their social media feeds. When you look at a social media ecosystem like that of fans of a particular sports team, there will be a very tight 6 degrees of separation-effect from one fan to another. There will be a comparable effect for people with all sorts of common interests pertaining to your industry, whether the appropriate network is LinkedIn in the B2B space, or Facebook in the D2C space.

Year round gamification gives the best results

Setting up a programme of several marketing games over the year will make customers want to participate as long as they feel they can win something, or derive some added value from the experiences. This will also allow you to improve on your marketing game strategy, as you will be able to look at your social media KPIs through the different accounts you have on each network, and your marketing game KPIs which you can monitor in real time through your Drimify dashboard. Between those 2 sources of data, you will be able to identify areas for improvement and trends over time, and better both your social media marketing campaigns and your gamification campaigns as part of your broader marketing strategy.

Modern online gamification has come into its own in recent years through advances in mobile technology and the prevalence of high speed internet, with the practice never having been more broadly utilised by businesses large and small. While gamification platforms like Drimify have contributed massively to the accessibility of gamification for smaller businesses, the possibilities and sophistication of gamified projects will improve even more as artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies become more advanced, more accessible, and easier to integrate.

Create your own game campaigns on social networks

By using elements from the world of games and video games, gamification on social networks has many advantages for your company and your business.

Interactive experiences that integrate easily on social networks will allow your company to more effectively connect with your audience. By inviting them to participate in fun, branded experiences that are highly shareable by promoting competition and social interaction, you can significantly increase your online visibility.

With Drimify, you will be able to create your marketing games easily and in complete autonomy, as you are customising different aspects of tried-and-tested game engines from our varied catalogue. You bring the marketing goals and messaging, the copy, the graphic design, and the little details, and our game engines do the rest. If you need it, our team is there to guide you as much or as little as you need through optional agency services.

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