Gamification To Boost Social Media
Gamification certainly offers a lot of benefits to corporate organizations by making their training a lot more engaging and fun. However, since gamification went mainstream, a lot of organizations have started experimenting with gamification and have found that employee Learning and Development or employee training isn’t the only thing it’s good for. That’s right! Gamification, as a matter of fact, can also be used by organizations to augment their social media campaigns, and reach users and potential customers like never before. By using the elements of gamification in well-thought-out and planned social media strategies, you too could get the number of followers on your social media pages you’ve always wanted and get your message across. How? Well, that’s what this article is all about.
1. Use Rewards
Rewards are one of the most important elements of gamification, and they offer extra motivation to users to do something you want them to. For example, you could offer your users a reward in exchange for them sharing your posts or getting other users to download your app (if you have one). The reward could be an intangible one, like badges or achievements, or a tangible one, like discounts, coupons or offers (this will require some financial backing). Rewards trigger the release of dopamine in individuals, which is a chemical associated with pleasure. Thus, while tangible rewards give users an added motivation, the intrinsic motivation that users get from intangible rewards is enough to get them hooked to your page or your app as well. As you’ll notice, rewards are used by a number of organizations (i.e. Uber, Swiggy, and Zomato) these days to get users to promote their pages or apps.
2. Use Points
Most games you have played have an element of points. The player accrues points by doing something. People love accruing points as they allow them to compete with each other over who has more. Organizations can design mini-games for their users where they accrue points doing something (could be anything from collecting coins, solving mazes or killing enemies) which they can share with their friends. This way they promote your social media page too. For added motivation, you could even offer a reward for a certain amount of points collected, using the reward element as well. However, it has been seen that points alone have the power to create engagement with users, and drive them to share scores and compete with their friends.
3. Use Timers
Timers are another gaming element that can help organizations compel their users to promote their pages or apps for them. Timers have been used in games for a long time, and are very effective due to their ability to create urgency. Time constraints make things exciting, and organizations can run contests on their page which last for a limited time, thus compelling users to answer questions, collect points or share their posts before time runs out. Time can also be used just like points to help users compete with each other, just make sure you also create a leaderboard (whether you use points, time or both) where users can see their timings or points as well as those of their friends.
4. Avatars
People love to escape the boring reality of who they are. Which is why people love games where they can choose a character and customize them to their heart’s content. Organizations could create engagement with users by allowing them to choose their own avatars when creating an account on their apps or websites and then customizing them as they wish. Give them a number of avatars to choose from, and to add engagement offer them unlockable avatars that can only be unlocked when they rack up a specific number of points. You can also offer other collectibles to go with the avatar, which can be unlocked by racking up a number of points.
Gamification isn’t just a digital learning strategy to make employee training and development more engaging for employees. It is being used in more and more novel and creative ways as it becomes more and more mainstream. Use gamification in your social media campaigns in the above-mentioned ways to increase engagement with your users, or think of another creative way to use them somewhere in your organization. Who knows, you may hit on something that revolutionizes the use of gamification!
Originally published at cblpro.com.
