5 Ways to Use Games for Better Social Engagement

There are many different terms used to describe how your business affects and interacts with your audience, but engagement is one of the most important. Audience engagement is really a measure of how often and for how long your audience interacts with your business or organization. Brief periods of engagement (a quick email to answer a question) are fleeting and don’t build loyalty or long-term relationships. Therefore, it’s vital for you to build better social engagement. How do you do that? Actually, games can help a great deal. Here are five ways to use games to build better social engagement.

Create Highly Shareable Content Games

One of the best ways to build social engagement with games is to create games that are highly shareable. Create a game that your audience wants to share with his or her friends and family. How do you do that? Don’t focus on the game itself so much as encouraging the user to share his or her results. Remember – this is all about them. When they achieve a good score or result, they’ll click the sharing buttons at the bottom of the game and let others know, drawing you even more users.

Create Hard Games

There’s no reason your games have to be brief things. In fact, harder games are more “addictive” in that your users will find themselves coming back time and again to get past a certain hurdle and move on. That also increases their achievement’s value when they win, and they’re more likely to share their results.

Give Value

If you think giving users value is limited to text or video content alone, think again. You can use your games as teaching opportunities to provide information and value to your players. When a user feels they’ve received something of value, they’re more likely to share it with others.

Playing with Others

What’s more social than playing a game with your friends or family? You can easily create a shareable game that allows your users to invite others to participate with them. They can play head to head, or in any other capacity.

Rewards

Offer rewards for completing your game. Those rewards should tie into your business, as well. You can also offer rewards for users inviting others or sharing with their own friends and family. This gives them an incentive to play on their own, as well as to spread the word about your game.

Increasing your social engagement is not only possible with games, but increasingly easy. You can even use games to drive the conversation with your customers by inferring information from their answers or actions within the game itself. Combined with strategic use of an opt-in form and your mailing list, it’s possible to engage those users down the road in any number of additional ways. Games have enormous potential, and they’re really only just getting started in the online environment.