Social media gamification can mean many different things. Gamification is already built in with like/follow/share tracking, but there is a whole other opportunity being missed.
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Say you have a small following on your socials that forms a growing online community. Great! Now getting it to grow is challenging – you need a differentiator. You need a way to provide additional value to your group. Here’s how you do that.
Imagine a system that periodically scans your social platform (I’ll use Instagram for this example). Each day it will review your posts from the last week and see who has interacted with your content and how. What if you can assign rewards points for those interactions. Now, if John Doe has liked 3 posts and shared 1, you can assign them 4 points.
These points are community specific and can be used as you’d like. Maybe we do a giveaway of something related to your content and each entry is just 1 point. Someone can’t go back and like old posts as the system only reviews the most recent ones. Your following grows, interaction rates jump, and folks become invested in your community as they build currency on your platform.
How can this be used in practice?
Say you are in independent game developer. As you develop the game and show the progress online, interactions can earn excited fans points. You can stand up your own shop to transfer these points into cosmetics for your game. Save up enough and you can get a social media warrior cape!
What if you had your own clothing store? Maybe points determine the next product line to be released? Maybe you get a free T-Shirt. What about a coupon?
I’m aiming to become an influencer – how do I break through the noisy crowd of competition? Offer these points and allow for fan meet-ups, content suggestions, personal notes, Q&A, etc. Now you have the ability to directly offer more than others by giving better rewards as a thank you for interaction.
Logistically how do you do this?
There are two main ways this can be done. Both have their challenges.
Yeah… this would be tough but not impossible. If these companies saw the value that could be driven here, their cooperation would allow seamless tracking and integration for a fantastic product.
Do it independently via web-scraping
This is technically and logistically complex due to policies and real limitations. Social media companies don’t want you to scrape their data. You can do some of this manually via account admin tools, but it is still challenging. If you can successfully scrape the data, it would become an incredibly valuable company that independent creators would want to tap into and utilize to grow their profiles.
Watch the Incentives
It is great to reward/thank folks for their support, but at some point people will come purely for the rewards. That is important to recognize and plan against. If this system were to work, it should be flexible enough for you to set up custom scoring rules to prevent this. It may look like a ‘real person’ validation based on their account or a ‘following duration’ metric that must have a minimum value.
You do not want to be buying interaction, you want to be rewarding it. That is a fine line to walk, but someone interested in this idea can surely figure it out.
See other ideas like this here!
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