To have a successful brand or employee advocacy program, you need your advocates to be highly engaged, to be regularly sharing your content to their social networks.
Within HRmarketer Advocacy Software, it’s easy to designate how to award points to advocates for shares and clicks for each social channel.
A great way to achieve high engagement is to turn your program into a game that advocates can win to achieve rewards. After all, about half of American adults play games, and who doesn’t like to win?
This is why we’ve just added gamification to our HRmarketer Advocacy Software. It will make leveraging the power of brand advocates—both inside and outside of the company—as easy and effective as possible.
The four new gamification features are:
1. Points Awarded for Sharing: Determine the number of points that advocates earn for sharing content on various social channels. This allows you to reward the specific sharing behaviors that are most important to you. For example, to encourage advocates to share content on a specific social platform (e.g., LinkedIn), the administrator can increase the points awarded for that particular channel.
2. Points Awarded for Engagement: Determine the number of points advocates earn for actual engagement (e.g., clicks) of their posts.
Here’s an example of a contest. When you set up contests in HRmarketer Advocacy Software, insert an image of the potential reward.
3. Point Caps: Place caps on points earned for sharing and engagement. This helps equalize the competition among advocates whose social networks vary in size, and it discourages spammy behavior that might work against your brand.
4. Group Goals: Set a target number of total points to be earned by all of your advocates during a given campaign or
contest. When activated, this feature allows all advocates to view the progress of the points as they are awarded, which encourages advocates to get involved early and share content before all of the points are awarded.
While HRmarketer Advocacy gives you visibility into which advocates are and aren’t sharing, it’s better to encourage participation by rewarding sharing than it is to punish non-participation.
In the sharing screen, advocates can see how many points it’s worth to share to different social channels. In this case, one of Twitter, three for Facebook and two for LinkedIn.
A great way to reward participating advocates is to create contests in which advocates can earn prizes for meeting goals. Be sure, however, that the goals you set are reasonable, so that advocates view them as attainable and worth pursuing. Unreasonable goals could actually hurt participation and engagement.
To enhance the gamification experience for advocates, HRmarketer Advocacy Software shows the points that they can score by sharing to different channels and also shows how far they’ve progressed toward reaching the contest goal.
Gamification, of course, isn’t anything new. It’s been around for about 10 years, and has been used successfully in marketing campaigns across industries of every kind. Consider giving it a try to see how it can help your brand or employee advocacy program be more successful.
