For the second year, marketers have proclaimed gamification the year’s trend. To be more precise, gamification in Instagram because games have been present on VKontakte for five years already, and on Facebook too, but less frequently.
Gamification uses game mechanics, components, and design elements in a non-game context.
This article is not about buying 52 ready-made games for stories. It’s about developing a comprehensive gamification of an account because subscribers who give likes and answer quizzes in stories are not always the same people. And if we want to engage as many people as possible, the games should vary in format and objectives. And Instagram highlights viewer will allow to view them anonymously.
For personal blogs and expert accounts, up to 3 game mechanics per week are allowed. For businesses and online stores – 1-2. To begin with, we will start with one activation per week, which means 52 concepts are needed for the year ahead. By the end of the third day, you will realize how you can safely generate two scenarios per week.
Activity contests
An activity contest is a game mechanics based on giving out points for actions: likes and comments to posts, reposts and marks in stories, participation in quizzes, and polls. Activity contests allow you to wake up the audience, who, up to this point, just read your posts without signaling their presence, silently liked or save Insta stories. To avoid burning out the audience, it is better to launch activity contests once every month and a half and last seven days. Thus, we get five more “game” weeks.
Use these days as fruitfully as possible:
- Tell about the company, your services, and your advantages;
- Show product novelties;
- Announce promotions and.
- Warm up the audience before the launch of the course.
Use gamification services to calculate points. The market leaders are Sub. by and Gamifer. Both allow you to count audience activity automatically, summarizing points for desired actions.
Quests
Find four more accounts/experts from related niches and arrange to play games together. For example, for fitness, related niches would be cosmetology, nutrition, personal brand, stylist, or makeup artist. Such quests aim to attract new subscribers through audience sharing without increasing the advertising budget. Everything is done by warming up and engaging the current audience.
Discuss the material you will publish with your partners to make the quest as interesting as possible. Link the posts so the topic starts in one account and continues in another.
Allocate one week for each partner, for a total of 4 more weeks.
Commercial accounts use quests to be able to “walk” the user through a game scenario and show them:
- a wide range of products (thus making it easier to choose, for example, a suit);
- the ability to customize the product;
- choosing a product based on personal qualities and values;
- the product as a certain symbol or trigger (the beginning of the adventure, change of status, key to the solution of the problem).
If we talk about a quest in the classic game sense, the most vivid example is “Choose Your Adventure” by Old Spice. The quest is made in the comic style and begins in one of the posts on the official account with a proposal to choose one of the actions.
A canonical example of gamification in Instagram was the Mercedes-Benz advertising campaign, where participants could assemble their GLA model, thus finding out its price at the end. Unlike Old Spice, the game did not start in the post but in a separate account.
That’s what most ready-made games for Stories are all about – fun for fun’s sake. But if we’ve got a subscriber’s attention, why not make good use of that time?
