Four ways to gamify your community strategy
4 Roads Four - Four ways to gamify your community strategy
How do you keep your online community engaged? We at 4 Roads get asked this question all the time because, aside from the technical aspects of creating a community, engagement and retention of users are among the hardest things to get right.
Community managers should be doing many things, from creating engaging content to blending online and offline experiences for their users. However, one aspect that can be overlooked from the development and strategy perspective is gamification.
Gamification is all around us – from those silver and gold stars at school to rewards for attendance and achievements. Even at work, you could argue that targets and the acknowledgement and financial rewards that come from achieving them are a form of gamification. Social media offers you a percentage score towards your profile completion; after that, the number of followers and likes are all gamification.
Gamification is simply applying gaming techniques to something that isn’t necessarily a game. Gamification motivates and engages users by creating playful experiences. Positive experiences and emotional reinforcement incentivise your users to participate actively.
Duolingo is an excellent example of gamification in action. Its 42 million active users, all trying to learn a language, are tied to the app by their ever-growing daily streaks, badges, and leaderboards. The key to the app’s success is harnessing gamification to keep people motivated and engaged in a long-term learning process.
Gamify your community
Thriving online communities make excellent use of gamification. The most common element is the ability to earn badges. It is one of the most simple and effective gamification tools for an online community.
But gamification is more complex than throwing up badges or copying Reddit with upvotes for posts.
Here are four things you should think of when you are creating your gamification strategy:
1 - Your Users
This should go without saying, but often, we see businesses planning out their community’s gamification aspect without tailoring that to their users. Badges should be more complex than just a generic award next to a user’s profile. If you are a fashion brand, a badge tailored to your content will resonate better than a simple number. Your badges can relate your brand or your work to your community. RapidMiner, for example, has its user ranks named after various elements known in the machine learning world. This adds more of a feeling of belonging to the community; Scott Genzer, the Community Manager at RapidMiner, explained that when ‘people achieve a certain rank, it’s a bit of an inside joke.’
When you consider your users and brand when gamifying, you add extra depth to your community, which in turn feeds a more engaged community.
2 - Providing Incentives
A brand community is different from a social media platform. Your users are likely to be fans and avid users of your brand. This provides easy additions to your gamification strategy: tangible brand rewards as incentives for participation and engagement.
You should plan to engage your top contributors personally, reinforcing that their participation in the community makes them part of the family. Sending them brand gifts encourages participation and creates a sense of purpose to contribute. There are tangible rewards as well as profile status rewards for participating.
Some brands take this gamification even further. Users who consistently and actively engage in the community are offered a chance to formally join the team and actively help and guide the community from within.
3 - Rewarding and punishing behaviour
Not all users will follow your guidelines. Toxic behaviour exists everywhere on the internet, and your online community won’t be exempt, no matter what your sign-up process is.
In your strategy planning, you should look at the aspects of gamification that can help you curb and mitigate any poor behaviour within the community. Letting peers review content allows your users to judge whether a post is worthy. A negative comment or post can automatically be hidden from users after several negative reviews or downvotes, as Reddit uses, combined with promoting and highlighting content that users are more positively engaged with.
This not only encourages your users to engage with worthy posts, but they also begin to feel more empowered to protect the value of the content that all users will see. As with all aspects of gamification, positive contributions not only in content but also in user moderation can be rewarded by medals, levels, and brand incentives.
4 - Bring the games into real life
Too many online communities remain that way. While gamification tactics motivate online behaviour, extending that to a real-world situation is where online communities form lifelong relationships with brands.
Take Harley Davidson as an example. Their community organises regular in-person meet-ups and ride events that any member can attend. This approach might only be practical for some brands; there is a particular use case for meeting up and enjoying a motorbike together, but brands can learn from this approach. For example, a brand like Thermomix has built a great online community around recipes. It can extend this to in-person cooking events that can be offered as a reward for the most active or valuable contributors to the community. The validation and rewards for online contributions can be harnessed into real-life social rewards as the most valuable contributors are recognised by your brand and seen by other members at an event, who can personally thank them and engage together about their love of your brand.
The more engaged your customers are in your online community, the more loyal they will be to your brand. When you think about gamification, think beyond the simple. Relate your online rewards to your brand and elevate your activities beyond just online. Create opportunities as rewards for your users to meet each other and to meet you and your team, who help create the community and the brand they love.
The more immersive your community journey, the greater the customer experience and the more value you will generate and benefit from.
Elevate Your Community Engagement with 4 Roads
Gamification can revolutionise your community strategy, driving engagement and loyalty. By integrating thoughtful, brand-specific gamification elements, you can create an immersive and rewarding experience for your users.
Ready to transform your online community? Contact us today to learn how 4 Roads can help you design a gamification strategy that captivates and retains your audience, fostering a vibrant, engaged community that loves your brand.