Getting fans is the easy part. Keep them engaged by letting them have some fun with your brand
Congratulations are in order to all brands with Facebook pages “liked” by thousands of Canadians, to those marketers who can truly claim they are having two-way conversations with consumers.
With that toast out of the way, a question is also in order: now what?
“Likes” are great, but the marketing value of a Facebook page isn’t based on the sheer size of its fan base. A truly effective Facebook marketer needs to give fans a reason to keep coming back to the page. One solution to this serious business problem is fun and games.
As marketers look to increase the sophistication of their social media programs, many are turning to branded Facebook games to keep consumers engaged.
“There is, in the online space, the idea of an exchange of value,” says Lance Martin, executive creative director at Toronto agency Taxi 2. “With a game, people understand that they’re ‘liking’ your page in exchange for a bit of fun.”
Martin has had the opportunity to consider this value proposition, as his shop has conceived and developed Facebook games for a pair of key clients in the past several months.
In January, Taxi 2 helped wireless company Koodo launch a Facebook game dubbed Friends With Benefits. The game is part of Koodo’s broader campaign to promote its Canada-wide calling plans, which promise customers no long-distance or roaming charges within the country.
To play the game, a consumer had to first “like” the Koodo Facebook page. Each time they logged into the game after that, a built-in game app automatically calculated the distance in kilometres between that player and any of his or her Facebook friends also playing the game. The object of the game was to recruit as many friends as possible to rack up kilometres until mid-February, at which time the player with the most kilometres was to be awarded a trip to a destination within Canada and a $5,000 cash prize.
Friends With Benefits, which was still underway as of press time, offered consumers the chance to win real-world prizes. But Martin believes the game itself offered additional value to players, intrinsic benefits that yielded repeat visits and plays.
“What’s fun about this game is that you can go back and interact with it. You can see if friends that you’ve invited have gotten involved or see if you’ve unlocked any hidden kilometres that you didn’t know about,” says Martin. “We’re trying, with the games we develop, to have benefits to coming back and checking them out.”
Martin notes that the game concept is a natural fit with the calling plan Koodo is promoting, the 19- to 24-year-old audience of heavy Facebook users it is targeting and the networking nature of Facebook itself. The results seem to bear this out: after just two weeks of the program, almost 11,000 people had played the game and about 80% of the 224,000 invitations to play had been accepted. The game also helped boost Koodo’s Facebook fan base by about 40,000.
Young adults aren’t the only audience that goes in for Facebook gaming, either. Another Taxi 2 client, the virtual bank Capital One, promoted its Aspire World Travel Mastercard product using a Facebook game and contest dubbed “Pin to Win.” Players had the chance to win one of four weekly prizes of a million travel rewards points by returning each week and placing a virtual pin on the location of what they guessed to be that week’s “mystery city.” The program helped net Capital One an additional 45,000 Facebook fans.
Both the Koodo and Capital One cases illustrate important elements to consider in the development of a branded Facebook game.
“We wanted to increase contest participation, page traffic and engagement, which we look at as ‘likes,’ comments or sharing,” says Clifton Braganza, vice-president of brand marketing at Capital One Canada. “To encourage positive engagement, simplicity was definitely important. The second piece is the ability to be shared.”
Keeping it simple, forging an intuitive connection with previous or existing branding initiatives and including appropriate incentives are keys to creating a Facebook game that consumers will actually want to play. And when it comes to incentives, real-world benefits such as prizes and rewards points aren’t always required. In some cases, a game just needs to be fun.
Take the case of Stop Sasq, a game developed by Toronto agency Grip Limited for Labatt’s Kokanee brand. Introduced last summer, the game invited Kokanee’s Facebook fans to fire video game-style at Sasquatch in an effort to stop the character from stealing cases of beer.
The game blended into a Kokanee narrative that included the killing off of the brand’s Ranger character by fan votes in 2009. In the absence of the Ranger, the story goes, Sasquatch was able to run amok. The game put fans in charge of stopping him.
Mike Bascom, national marketing manager for Kokanee, says the narrative layer, along with game play functionality such as the ability to challenge friends and compare scores, helped the brand improve its engagement metrics by 300% to 600% without dangling any prize carrots.
“It was pure-play incentives in this case,” says Bascom. “We know that with our fan base, if we provide them with the right content and engaging material, they will come and play again and again. We don’t need to use prizes to get them.”
Associated with promotions and prizes or not, more Facebook games are coming. Cineplex’s Scene loyalty program, for example, is set to debut its Scene Trivia Stars game, which will test players’ movie knowledge. Conceived with the help of Toronto agencies Capital C and Cloud AdAgents, the game’s functionality includes the ability to play privately against friends. Members and non-members alike can play, but Scene members get the added benefit of competing for real-life rewards points.
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Katherine Dimopoulos, head of marketing and brand experience for Scene, believes the game can serve as an acquisition tool, but also as a way to increase the Scene card usage of the program’s members and 200,000 Facebook fans.
“Think of it as a virtual way to engage our Scene members to keep Scene top of mind in between those real-life interactions with us,” says Dimopoulos. “This Facebook game allows Scene members to win, to compete and show off their knowledge, which is an active and emotional way to participate with our brand.”
According to Peter Coish, president of Cloud AdAgents, marketers who harvest actions and emotions will get much more value from Facebook than those who simply harvest fans.
“If they’re clicking ‘like’ to access a game and play it over the long run, then I’d argue that’s doing far more to build your brand than a short-term contest where people just want to get their name in the barrel and never want to engage on your page again,” says Coish.
Facebook games and contests can go hand in hand, of course, and both can help a brand get more “likes.” A truly great Facebook game, though, keeps fans engaged with a brand for the love of the game itself.
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