Gamification is a great community tactic to increase brand loyalty, foster community participation and increase user engagement. Gamification works as a points based program to incentivize users to engage with other users in the community and receive points in return for given actions.
Benefits of Community Gamification
Gamification can support your community goals by building brand loyalty, encourage participation and drive engagement.
Brand loyalty is created through a brand successfully developing an emotional connection with its customers. When customers feel emotionally connected to a brand, they’re likely to stick with it even as other factors may otherwise drive them to explore other options.
Four key emotions that evoke brand loyalty are:
- Feelings of belonging: The person feels as though they are part of something larger and that they belong, are accepted and are not alone.
- Feeling of importance: The person feels as though they can contribute as a member of the social circle and have a voice. They feel as though they matter.
- Feeling of security: The person feels safe being connected to other like-minded individuals and doesn’t have to worry about being judged.
- Feeling of happiness: Last but not least is the feeling of happiness that comes with social connectivity due to all the other positive emotions, noted above.
Gamification directly impacts community participation since it gives users a reason to participate. Including game elements in a community acts as incentive to participate since it provides people with the opportunity to earn points, badges, etc.
It’s one thing to participate in a community, but it’s another to be engaged. Engagement is when a person participates in a meaningful way over a long period of time. One way to help establish customer engagement in your community is by strategically implementing a gamification system that encourages participation.
Gamification is one of the best ways to boost community engagement since it helps to bring out the competitive side that all of us humans have!
Gamification Features
Points
Members can earn points by answering questions, getting positive reactions from their answers, unlocking achievements, earning badges, and other activities. You can choose how many points each action is worth in order to encourage the type of behaviour that you want to see in the community.
Badges
Vanilla gamification offers the ability to not only select badges from a variety of different options, but it also allows you to create custom badges.
Reactions
Reactions are a feature that help people build their reputation. While stock reactions are available, administrators have the ability to customize this feature to suit the brand. With this feature, members can share how they feel about a post.
Ranks
Ranks allow you to reward users for positive actions. By default, ranks are awarded based on points earned, but can be customized by time spent on the site, roles and even a combination of these. Ranks can be used to limit abilities and/ or reward members in your community based on Vanilla's reputation system.
Leaderboards
Include a leaderboard that displays the names of the leaders and their points. With Vanilla, you’re able to have a leaderboard for “weekly” leaders, “daily” leaders and “all-time” leaders.
Strategy
Check out Vanilla's Strategic Guide to Community Gamification for more great ideas on how to implement Gamification into your community.