I was thrilled to speak with Kimba Cooper-Martin from Kimba Digital this week about all things gamification and social media. Kimba helps businesses gamify their social media, launches, courses and memberships.
Why gamification in social media strategies can be a game changer (excuse the pun!)
Before we explore how you can introduce gamification into your social media, let’s look at the reasons why you should consider it:
- It will increase engagement as it’s interactive and entertaining.
- It makes your posts more fun and encourages your customers and potential customers to stick around for more!
- It can improve your brand awareness by making your product or service more memorable.
- It improves reach, puts you in front of a bigger audience and gets you more sales.
- It can help you collect valuable customer data.
- It drives a desired action. You can encourage your audience to share a post, share their opinions, take part in a competition, make a purchase, or head over to a landing page.
Over 80% of marketers say that interactive content is more effective than its static counterpart.
What is gamification?
If you’ve not heard of the words gamify or gamification before, you’ll have definitely experienced them. Gamification is when you are influenced to join in with something. Just like any game, you play along because want to experience something enjoyable, be a part of something, beat a competitor, beat your personal best, get to the next level and hopefully feel the thrill of a win! Even if you start to feel frustrated, the drive to get a step further spurs you on.
But
gamification is more than a game. It involves psychology as it motivates people
to achieve more.
Examples of gamification
Injecting intrigue and curiosity will always attract interest. Before Kimba announced that she was launching a gamification service she teased her social media audience. She explored ways to tell them that something exciting was on the horizon and invited them to guess what it was.
To help her audience, she created a ‘treasure hunt’ style campaign. This involved people signing up for an email that revealed clues.
How clever. Without realising it, her potential customers were interacting with gamification! And what a fab way of getting email addresses and connecting with your community!
M&M’s used gamification when they launched their pretzel flavoured M&M. They simply designed a Where’s Wally? style image asking their followers to find the pretzel M&M. It wasn’t an expensive campaign, but it certainly got people involved and talking about their new flavour.
And if you’re thinking, ‘but my business isn’t as exciting as tasty confectionery’ it’s time to reframe your thoughts. The more ‘boring’ your industry, product or service is, the better as your competitors won’t be using gamification in their social media. This is your opportunity to really stand out with something completely unique
Kimba’s gamification tips for social media
1. Start Simple
Follow M&M’s example – a campaign doesn’t have to be all singing, all dancing to get great results. Consider doing polls, interactive stories, quizzes and the like.
You can also do a manual poll. Ask a question with three possible responses and encourage the reader to write their preference of A, B or C in the comments. This engagement will help increase the visibility of your post.
Or you could do a competition and ask your followers to send in a picture (that meets certain criteria). If you get too many pictures, throw it out to your audience to decide. The more engagement you can drum up, the better!
2. Think about your objectives
Gamification is more than just fun; it must have a purpose. Think about the reason behind it. Is it to get engagement, increase the number of followers, drive customers to your website, raise awareness of a new product, or something else? Once you know what it is you want to achieve, it will be easier to identify what kind of gamification will work best.
3. Prepare your audience
Drum up the excitement and keep the momentum going by running teaser social media posts. Promote your next gamification campaign more than you think it will need! Send emails, do social media lives, talk about it at networking sessions – make sure everyone knows about it!
And don’t forget to explain how to get involved. You never know it could be the first time your audience has seen anything like this before.
It’s sad when some people think that their gamification campaign didn’t work, when it was actually the marketing and preparation that was at fault.
4. Don’t expect a 100% success rate
Things happen and we’re all different. External factors can impact the success of a social media campaign and not everyone is going to like it. Not everyone likes doing polls, entering competitions, sharing their opinions so openly, and the like.
So don’t ever beat yourself up if it’s not a complete success. Do it again, but on another date, maybe pick another time of the day, or try it on another social media platform.
5. Think about why your customers or clients should care.
Give reasons why they should engage with you. Remember, people are busy and sometimes not comfortable about interacting online. Consider what might make someone stop the scroll to share your post or comment or like. Ask yourself, if you saw this post and were busy; is there a strong enough reason to make you interact with the post? If not, you need to change tact!
Gamification: Social Media Templates
Grab your Gamification Social Media Stories and Posts Template Pack direct from the expert! Kimba has developed two packs to get you started on your gamification journey.
When used properly, these templates will help you to:
- Increase your audience.
- Increase engagement.
- Increase your knowledge of your audience.
- Increase your audience’s knowledge of you.
Follow Kimba for more social media gamification tips:
Are you ready to take your social media to the next level?
To maximise your impact on social media come and join The Social Flock! You’ll become a valued member of an inspiring and supportive community where everyone has one thing in common – a desire to grow their business with social media. This exclusive group provides accountability, social media content tips, advice and access to industry experts, and a calendar full of events.
As ever, if you have any questions, get in touch. I’m here to help you succeed with social media!
Bye for now,
Becs
