Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Dipping into Hot SMM Concepts

One way to stay ahead of the competition is to keep abreast of the marketing trends that directly affect your customers. Several major trends have recently impacted the social media realm. You should determine if they have application for you. Even if you do not immediately see a way to apply them, you’ll want to monitor them closely. We mention them here and cover them more in depth in the chapters cited below.

Discovering gamification

There are basically two camps of people online — those who believe that online games are a complete waste of time and those who find them irresistible. But are social games actually games? They are, and again, they aren’t. Social games incorporate game techniques in a social setting with the aim of encouraging you to interact with a business, a charity, or perhaps an educational entity, to name a few.

You’re playing a social game if you are on one of the social media platforms and the game encourages you to take action that surrounds a brand. Where do these social gamers like to play? According to a study by the Information Services Group in 2010, Facebook is the destination of choice. Eighty-three percent of study participants play there.

Typically when you think of a “gamer,” you might think of an adolescent with lots of time and energy to master ever higher levels of game play. But actually, according to the same study, the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. Businesses of all types are creating games that ...