"Gamification" is one of the big new buzzwords in business. The term itself has only existed since 2002, and has only become popular in the past three years. Despite this newness, it has been estimated that 70 percent of Forbes Global 2000 businesses will be using gamification by next year.
What is Gamification?
"Gamification" refers to the practice of incorporating elements of gaming into real-life marketing or business processes. For example, people play games because it satisfies their competitive nature, or gives them a sense of achievement or status. Gamification involves using those same motivations to get people to engage in desired activities, such as filling out an online profile, visiting a store or (for employees) making more sales calls.
The idea is that, by making the process a bit more like a game, you can get more people to take part and gain more satisfaction from doing so.
Gamification and Social Sharing
In the context of social media marketing, gamification strategies can be used to encourage users to engage with, share and link to your company's content--which will give you more exposure to their friends, their friends' friends and eventually the social network as a whole.
To do so, you must offer one or more of the incentives inherent to gaming:
- Competition. You can make it possible to "win" at linking or sharing. Winning is its own reward, so you can employ this strategy without necessarily providing any material prize.
- Status. Similarly, you can provide a sense of status to those who take part or who contribute the most. Top contributors can be identified as such, perhaps with different status levels so people continually have something to strive towards.
- Achievement. People can be rewarded with online badges or other forms of recognition for completing certain tasks or objectives.
- Closure. People want to finish the game and know how the story ends. Progress bars or encouragements to fully complete a profile can get more people to go all the way to your desired outcome.
The Game's Afoot
There are many ways to put gamification into practice in the social networking sphere, and creativity is encouraged. Below are a few of the potential applications.
- Encouraging check-ins. Foursquare is essentially gamification turned into a social network, and you can gain visibility on that site by rewarding check-ins. But you can also use gamification to encourage Facebook users to check in, which can gain you new customers through the "Nearby" mobile app.
- Improving rankings. On sites such as Facebook, the visibility of posts is largely determined by the number of likes, comments and shares. By using gamification to incentivize such actions, you can improve your content's EdgeRank and become visible to more users.
- Going viral. The right competition or contest can cause your content to be shared enough times to truly go viral.
- Trending. By turning the use of a particular hashtag into a competition or game, some companies have been able to increase their reach by trending on Twitter or other social networking sites.
- Rewarding referrals. Though referral programs are nothing new, adding game elements can encourage more customers to refer friends or provide reviews and recommendations online.
- Motivating employees. Marketing staff don't have to be the only ones promoting your company on social media. Since you have a significant ability to recognize or reward employees, you can use internal gamification to get your entire workforce engaged in social marketing.
Gamification is certainly a growing field, so new strategies and tools are still being developed. By starting to utilize it now, you can be better equipped to stay ahead of the game.
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
