What are the best ways to use gamification to drive engagement in a community?

Pramod Rao
33 replies
Points system, badges, leaderboard, recognition. Big fan of how Stackoverflow implemented it without diluting the experience/quality. Any other ideas/examples?

Replies

Ryan Hoover
I dislike the word gamification, largely because it's overused and misunderstood. One of the biggest faults is throwing points and badges around when users do something. Better: Reward users for doing something hard/rare so that it means something or enable the community to recognize valuable contributions (e.g. upvotes for launching something interesting on PH).
Pramod Rao
@rrhoover thanks, Ryan! Agree, points for doing something might lead to an increase in activity but at the cost of authenticity. Enabling the community to recognize value is a great way to think about it.
Iuliia Shnai
@rrhoover Do you consider day strike on PH as a gamified element? For me it is. Simple, but powerful progress bar, which keep me more engaged already after only 4 days. In general I am quite positive about gamification inside products if it is ethical. And if it is too much the users will say:) Reddit I think give karma points for every message, at least before, but it felt ok and they had their reason for that.
Ryan Hoover
@iuliia_shnai it's certainly an example of gamification. If I'm honest, it's super shallow and probably not that impactful (we haven't a/b tested to see if it increases engagement meaningfully) but it's not disruptive to the experience and some people like it.
Naman Sarawagi
I think people like a general "Thank you" and want to participate if they get alerts for relevant conversations. Score keeping - I think works for mid-level engaged users. Not for people who haven't started or are already highly engaged. Recognition between peers is good. I should be able to see them see me. Easily happens when you call someone on stage in offline mode. Not sure about online.
Pramod Rao
@namansr agree! Acknowledgement of effort and recognition go a long way in any interaction. In the online world, having a space for shoutouts and celebrating small wins is what I've seen work wonders.
Fateh Ali
Multiple reasons are given for this technology craze. Badges, leaderboard, recognition, loyalty points, groups (custom built for business usecase), reward system In a way, we are addicted to dopamine hits and are using our phones to satisfy our constant need for instant gratification. That is partially correct, although other neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins also come into play when implementing gamification in your employee or customer engagement strategies. In regards to engagement, people get motivated with Extrinsic motivation - where we are motivated to do something because of the external reward. Extrinsic motivators are often established through gamification as points, milestones, achievements, rewards or notifications Gamification in a community is a proven method to add to customer engagement strategies and deliver results. Using gamification for apps can increase usage and adoption rate and often makes your product more habit-forming. Cheers' Fateh Ali CEO & Co-founder Kitcod.com Enabling in-app social API
Pramod Rao
@fateh_shahkar yes, done well (like Stackoverflow), it does help drive quality engagement. However, badges and points for the sake of it can result in negative behaviour. This is a great resource to think about all aspects of gamification: https://yukaichou.com
Fateh Ali
@prao25 Actionable gamification is interesting, thanks for sharing
Emil Ahayeu
Hi! Thanks for question:) I've done chatbots for Facebook and Instagram communities. There are some interesting gemification mechanics. You can give out points for UGC activity. And every week, keep statistics in the community, people who will perform tasks and participate in activities will get into the "hat" of the group. And they will be seen by all other members of the community. We also did chatbot quizzes both in comments under posts and in private messages to the community. The bot saw who answered first and recognized the answers and awarded points. We also gifted AR masks for doing something in the community. We also raffled off stickers, we made unique stickers and shared them via unique links. The person did the tasks and could exchange the points for a sticker pack. As for Instagram. In it, also you can place the bot, both under the posts, and in private messages. With his help, you can track user activity, for example, to arrange a challanges "likes under posts and stories" and for this to give some rewards or points. You can also run UGC campaigns in Instagram. Make games and filters with AR. Games can be done for a set of a number of points and the subsequent shearing in your account, at the end of the month you can arrange a lottery among those who have shared their content with your AR-game or filter. You can of course combine the whole thing to a blockchain and give out tokens, if your project is related to cryptocurrency. All of the above cases worked well with B2C. Hope my tips will be useful:)
Iuliia Shnai
Interesting topic! I recently researched different gamified elements used by companies for user onboarding and engagement. Found some cool like: #1 Tokens (TwitterHunter) #2 Virtual currency (Reddit) #3 Timed quizzes #4 Badges (Coursera) #5 Levels (Linkedin) #6 Roulette & Spin the wheel (SaaStr) #7 Avatars (Reddit) #8 Money rewards & Referrals (AppSumo) #9 Checklists (Practically everyone now:) #10 Progress bar (PH, and many others who have checklists) Not sure they all fit for community engagement but I think some ideas can be useful:) Especially I love tokens, from TH. Here, more thoughts and screenshots from different tools. https://www.marbleflows.com/blog...
GamerSeo
There is a post on gamification on our blog, we invite you to read it :)
Pramod Rao
@gamerseo thanks, please share the link here
Evgeniy Yakubovskiy
Hi all. I would like to give you one successful and exciting example of gamification: The Fitness+ app from Apple is a motivational service that offers exercise programs for users with different fitness levels. Gamification tools include motivating music tracks, ratings of own and other users' achievements, activity rings to track progress, animated congratulations for achieving a particular result, and others.
Cyrus
@prao25 @evgeniyyakubovckiy Self rating is very interesting concept. Didn't think about that 🤔
Pramod Rao
@evgeniyyakubovckiy thanks, Evgeniy! Will check it out.
Suvojit Manna
@tiagorbf does it well for his community WBE, with https://wannabe-entrepreneur.com... these stats !
Rich Watson
NVSTly: Social Investing
NVSTly: Social Investing
Our app uses a lot of that- reputation points, distinguishable badges to earn, and leaderboard rankings. Our app is for stock (and soon crypto) traders to track and share their trades. They can earn high win rate, top trader, and activity badges. There is a leaderboard that ranks traders based on time frames such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly and all-time. Their trading stats on their dashboard are public for everyone to see. With the way covid and the GameStop short squeeze on Reddit happened with imepcable timing of each other this brought in a lot of young traders and gamifying the app just a bit really interests them.
Pramod Rao
@richw thanks, Rich. These look well-designed to drive engagement with the product. Does your product also have the ability for members to interact with or help each other?
Rich Watson
NVSTly: Social Investing
NVSTly: Social Investing
@prao25 Not directly through the app no, we operate on Discord where users engage and interact with each other. Eventually we'll add commenting on the app.
Andrew James Bagby
I think badges, leaderboards, and other status symbols are over rated. Easy solutions for us, not very interesting for the user. I'd think more about access and tiers of access. Why am I engaging and what is the next functionality I unlock? I'm more interested in working towards something rather than grinding something for points.
Pramod Rao
@andrew_bagby tiers of access / concept of working towards something is a great way to look at it vs just points! Thanks, Andrew.
Nick Foscolos
Highly recommend to check the book 'Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products https://g.co/kgs/TxN1AZ. I read it recently and and found it extremely informative on the subject.
Pramod Rao
@foscolosnick spot on! One of the the books that I try and go back to every couple of years.
Yoshika Lowe
The Green Book Project
The Green Book Project
I think Yu-kai Chou gives excellent insight about gamification and how to drive engagement beyond badges, leaderboard, etc. Here: https://yukaichou.com/gamificati... Although he does explain the place of and relevant uses for those forms of rewards that we think of when we hear the word gamification in his book: "Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards." He talks about the 8 Core Drives of Gamification which he called Octalysis.
Pramod Rao
@ylowe thanks, Yoshika! Love the book and how it talks about gamification is not just points, badges and leaderboard.
Cyrus
Gamification is nice but has its limits. You will always have to improve the game or invent new ones. I think the focus should be on creating features or tools that gets embedded in the daily lives of users. This way it turns into a habit.
Russell Liverman
It seems to me that all this will work fine if you add nft to it :)
Social Talent
Mini-games are a good way to drive engagement = investment = transactions. A good example is promo.suite.social
Eric Millen
An idea we are mulling over for my company's dating app is using gamification to drive user engagement in the content moderation side of the experience. Our app is very open and is essentially a publishing platform (personal ads) so there is a huge potential for abuse (we've seen plenty already). Our community has both automated moderation mechanisms as well as user-centred mechanisms that rely on users reporting content that violates our terms. The gamification idea is to encourage users who report abusive content recognition in a way that is either private (sending messages thanking them for their diligence in their dms) or public (adding a badge to their published ads) or potentially giving them free upgrades that expire (ie: ad free experience for the month since we monetize with banner and rewarded video ads). One of our main pitches to the user is that we don't make them jump through hoops to connect with other users so we don't want to dilute that proposition by muddying the core experience of browsing ads/replying/posting/etc, but we do like the idea of rewarding users who value the platform's freedom and help to keep it open, as well as the idea that they will spend more time in app hunting out the infringing ads (potentially even globally since we allow global browsing) Basically, we want to use gamification to encourage loyalty rather than keep the user tied up in the app, and to give them recognition for helping us out in policing the system. Any thoughts on this "deputy" idea?