5 ways to Gamify your Facebook Initiatives
Wednesday, 10 Jun, 2011
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5 ways to Gamify your Facebook Initiatives
Many companies are spending thousands of dollars developing a Facebook fan page but are not seeing any kind of long-term engagement with their fans, or any kind of ROI. In a previous article, TravelMole talks about some HUGE reasons as to why this is happening – right from the get-go!
With these fan page roadblocks in mind, how are companies able to overcome them? How can they keep their Facebook fans locked in and consistently engaged?
Gamification to the Rescue!
Gamification is the integration of Game Mechanics (think achievements, membership/status levels, badges, rewards staircases, leaderboards, etc.) in non-game environments to boost audience engagement, loyalty and fun! It is the concept that you can apply the basic elements that make games fun and engaging to things that typically aren’t considered a game.
With Gamification – No More Start-Stop Mentality
By using Game Mechanics (Gamification), your marketing efforts on Facebook no longer need to be developed with a “start-stop” mentality (campaign by campaign). These fun tools, also known as “funware,” are designed to keep your core customers more engaged and involved with your brand over longer periods of time. So, no more starting from scratch each time you launch a new campaign.
Examples of Game Mechanics
· Badges – Provides instant gratification for your ambassadors with achievements and bragging rights.
· Rewards Staircase – Stimulates activity with multiple reward levels. Here, your brand ambassadors earn and redeem points for their activities.
· Leaderboard – Instigates competitiveness by displaying an Ambassador’s achievements
· Achievement Notifications – Motivates and incentivizes your army of Ambassadors to act
· Coupons/Promo Codes – Drives traffic to both online and retail locations
Gamification Metrics
The other big reason companies are using Game Mechanics? Metrics. Companies want to know if what they are doing is resonating with their customers or not. Are they in fact staying involved for longer periods of time? To better understand Gamification Metrics, let’s take a look …
· Engagement – Engagement is the most important metric for success in Gamification. If Engagement is higher, generally all of the other metrics will be as well.
· Influence – Gamification can give you influence over your customer’s actions. This can happen over time such as people visiting X page more often because you’ve incentivized it or built unique content such as ‘quests’ to promote it. Also influence can be instantaneous if you have built Gamification content that you can push to players instantly to give them some offer, challenge etc.
· Loyalty – Loyalty as a metric can mean many things. Google Analytics would call this a user that returns with great frequency. Loyalty in Gamification also refers to users constantly picking your brand over a competing brand given that all offers are equal.
· Time Spent – Time Spent is straight forward, each user spends more time per visit than they did before.
· Virality – Virality represents users talking more about your brand, through social networks, direct contact online and word of mouth. With Gamification, virality can be that you’ve incentivized a user to share with their friends or invite friends in for a specific activity as part of the gameplay.
Gamification Non-Metrics
These Benefits are listed separately from the rest because they are very important benefits you should strive for with Gamification. However, they are usually not used as a metric for success in Gamification.
· Fun – Fun is not easy to measure, but it’s definitely a major benefit of Gamification. Things are generally better if they’re more fun. The Fun Theory is worth exploring, the idea that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better.
· Revenue – Through influence, virality and almost every other benefit of Gamification, you can expect an increase in Revenue if you are in an already revenue making business.
So, do you want to implement a few Game Mechanics into your Facebook marketing efforts after having read all of this? If yes, how’d you like to have access to a platform that is pre-built with them and can be live in a week?!
Enter TravelMole Bamboo for Facebook, the most effective and efficient way for brands to engage people on the Internet
Every TravelMole Bamboo engagement is a personalized, consumer-initiated brand experience where your core customers make connections with your brand, and share it with their friends. Bamboo is the world’s ?rst uni?ed platform to incorporate Social Media, Af?liate Programs and Loyalty Marketing, and was designed both to work as a stand-alone loyalty/af?liate program or you may share data with your existing rewards program and make it an even more powerful tool.
Bamboo provides points as incentives for your core audience of Ambassadors to share your latest news, polls, videos, articles, virtual gifts and coupons with their Friends. Numbers are only good when they can be used for something. With Bamboo, brands get 24/7 access to Mission Control which provides metrics on what’s converting and what isn’t, so changes can be made on the ?y.
TravelMole Bamboo Metrics
With the Bamboo Platform, companies will know every impression, hit, visit, page view, click path, lead, and sale. Equally, they will know who did it, when, where they came from, and the audience (friends and followers) and their interconnections.
From all of the data collected, Bamboo allows marketers the ability to run an exhaustive statistical analysis and create reports: projected/actual reach, popularity and conversion rates of specific pieces of content, results of polls, etc. Some reports are similar to conventional web analytics, and some are specific to social media such as virality and popularity of the content, size of unique audience, etc.
TravelMole Bamboo Connects it all Together…
If you are serious about reaching deep into the Facebook network (700+ million) to connect with new audiences, and to keep your core customers engaged over longer periods of time, the TravelMole Bamboo Platform is the only platform within Facebook that truly allows you to do this and for the travel space, it’s the ultimate social loyalty program!
For further information please:
Email [email protected]
Stephen Milton
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