Social media has become a goldmine and is evolving day by day rapidly. To attract a target audience for your business, you need to leverage different social platforms to become a client's favorite. However, being a standout business is a huge challenge. To overcome this challenge, gamification is the way to go. There are various gamification techniques that you can incorporate into your social media campaign to enhance brand awareness, skyrocket user engagement, and push your target audience to take the desired action.
Here, in this article, we will show you how you can supercharge your social media campaign through five sure-shot gamification techniques:
Top Five Ways to Supercharge Social Media Campaigns Through Gamification
1. Define Clear Objectives and Game Mechanics
Before you can get into the gamification implementation phase, you need to understand your social media campaign clearly. The first thing you must know is what your target audience needs. Do you need their attention, or do you want to push them to create content for you, or do you need their participation to complete a particular task? Also, do you want to use any specific WordPress gamification plugin on your website?
You must structure your game mechanics after identifying your social media campaign goals. The mechanics should be aligned with your campaign objectives. You can consider several factors, such as leveling up, earning points, or virtual item collection. A clearly-defined game mechanics is a perfect recipe to motivate users and hook them with your campaign.
2. Create Interactive Contests and Challenges
Challenges and interactive competition always hook the audience and are the best gamification tools for supercharging social media campaigns. These tools not only boost user engagement but also encourage UGC. For example, your social campaigns can ask users to share their best memories and photo contests relevant to your brand. Creating polls and quizzes is also something you can consider to ignite interaction and collect valued insights.
Here, you need to ensure you offer your users some rewards and incentivize them as well. You can include contests in your social media campaign and ask users to engage their friends and families to increase your campaign reach.
3. Implement Points, Badges, and Leaderboards
Gamification mostly revolves around leaderboards, badges, and points. Users can earn points by finishing tasks like liking, subscribing, reposting a particular post, or referring friends to your social media campaign. Points accumulation automatically ignites the sense of participation and achievement among users.
You can reward badges for completing a milestone or a certain task. You can incorporate leaderboards in your campaign to showcase top users on a roster. These few gamification techniques create a desire to achieve something and drive them to do more.
Nike has done something unique in this respect. Nike implemented a gamification technique in their Nike running app. The app enables users to seamlessly monitor various fitness metrics, including calories burned, pace, blood pressure, time, location, and distance covered. Further, the world-class fitness brand integrated the feature of social sharing within its running app. Social sharing helped them showcase their achievements and progress across social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
4. Encourage Social Sharing and Virality
Social sharing is the flawless way to skyrocket your social media campaign and get the desired result. You only need to integrate different features so your users can share their achievements and success on their social profiles. You can help them by incorporating pre-made messages and sharing buttons to make the sharing process seamless.
Also, you can stretch your campaign reach and attract new users who have trust in their recommended connections.
5. Provide Meaningful Rewards and Incentives
Digital incentives and rewards are essential for a successful social media campaign through gamification. Rewards are the ultimate source of motivation and engagement. All you need is to ensure your rewards awarding policy is aligned with your audience’s desires and interests. Early bird discounts or early access, special discounts, and tangible products are a few examples of reward motivation.
Moreover, another strategy for meaningful rewards is to collaborate or attract sponsorship to make your social media campaign more appealing. A perfect example of powering the social campaign is Uber's incorporation of gamification techniques using social sharing. The online ride-hailing app saw an increase in its user base by implementing a clever marketing strategy of offering free rides to those who referred Uber to their friends.
Free ride-sharing was the perfect example of a user-generated content strategy, which increased the user base and made users excited and engaged. The free ride technique got instantly popular on social media, and Uber also saw an effect in the word-of-mouth marketing strategy. All was done without investing any significant advertising budget.
Wrap Up
Integrating gamification in a social media campaign is an instant recipe to increase user engagement by driving the desired action. The success heavily depends upon the campaign objectives, interactive competition, meaningful rewards, social sharing encouragement, leaderboards & badges, and immersive audience experience. Lastly, you need to monitor the output of your gamified campaigns and tweak the same as per the need. So, leverage gamification techniques in your social media campaign and see tangible results quickly.
