As I pointed out last week, gamification and social media belong together. Gamification is all about boosting customer loyalty and social media channels are vital in that process. At BigDoor, we have focused our platform on social media engagement; rewarding program users for shares, likes, tweets and recruits from their social network. The closer we can get to complete integration with a user’s social network, the more successful our gamification solutions have become.

Marketers know the value of a Facebook like or a Twitter follow. In today’s online world, a large majority of leads, customers and sales are coming in through social media channels, so building a base of followers that is engaged, active and paying attention is invaluable. While there are a variety of blogs and articles on the subject of building a fan base on social media, many of these tactics focus on high numbers of followers, with minimal focus on the true value those followers bring. It has become common for someone with thousands of followers to have minimal engagement  between those followers and their brand. Why? Because like many ‘get rich quick’ schemes, the tactics employed to gather large quantities of followers, don’t focus on the long term investment, namely, are these followers going to buy from your brand? Engage with your brand? Share your brand with their other networks? If not, they are of minimal value other than bragging rights for your marketing team.

Gamification has been held up as the solution for loyalty and engagement issues on the web, and we obviously believe this to be true. Why? Because gamification implementations like ours that focus on harnessing the power of social media are really good at finding fans and followers that are interested, active and ripe for business. By creating incentives for site visitors to become followers, fans and registered users, brands will see an increase in their social media networks and this increase comes from people who are active and out to consume content. But the engagement cannot (and for BigDoor does not) end there. Users need to continue to be rewarded for participating and involving their own networks in your brand and social media efforts.

One of the reasons that I love working in marketing here at BigDoor is that since the beginning, our focus has been on genuine results, strong analytics and practicing what we preach. Our widget is present on this blog, and in the spirit of proving that BigDoor does what we say we do, here is a look at our own Twitter account, taken today.

10K+ Followers is a pretty good start, but are those followers’ actually real active people?

98% of them are. Not only that, but  0% of them are fake accounts to make it look like we have a bigger influence than we do.

For comparison, here is a look at another popular twitter account in the gamification industry, they currently have a much larger following on Twitter than BigDoor’s 10K, but take a look at how their account breaks down:

51% fake. Not to mention 23% inactive. As a marketer, would you spend valuable marketing dollars with this company to achieve that kind of ‘engagement’ or loyalty?

Obviously, gamification isn’t the only reason we have such a high rate of good followers, the marketing team at BigDoor has spent a lot of time finding industry experts, unfollowing inactive accounts and generally managing our twitter. Those numbers represent two things: we understand social media and we understand the importance of an engaged audience. Gamification, loyalty programs and rewards are the tools we use to help marketers achieve their goals.

We aren’t saying that gamification can create an engaged social network without the commitment from a brand to create frequent, good content, but we do believe that our platform and expertise can give marketers a step above the competition in filling their social networks and websites with active and engaged users, in a relatively short period of time.

What does your following look like?