By Gamification is one way to keep your audience’s attention. By using games for Instagram, you will not only draw attention to your blog but also get feedback. You’ll also be able to promote products, build up your reach, increase engagement, and motivate your followers to buy. Plus, everyone loves engaging, interactive content, and Instagram’s ranking algorithms love the likes, views, and comments they bring.
Why apply text games to Instagram
The world’s biggest brands have been using game mechanics to promote their businesses for years. Instagram games work great, too. This is probably one of the best legal ways to increase engagement on a profile, which is known to be a major factor influencing rankings on Instagram.
Games allow you to naturally increase engagement in your account by luring a bunch of likes, comments and saves from followers by inviting them to take part in a short, engaging interaction.
There are several reasons why gamification works:
– Games are always fun, and the competitive spirit ignites natural excitement.
– Out-of-the-box catchy content always promotes naturally and increases reach because users are eager to share it.
– Games arouse interest and make users actively interact with the content because they require a response.
– If the game is themed, made up individually for your subscribers, rather than copied, it will set you apart from your competitors.
– Game challenges can require users to actively interact with each other. And the more such interactions, the higher the profile engagement.
Gamification looks natural, fresh, it’s really interesting to users and useful for promoting the account.
Formats of games in Instagram
First of all, you should decide on the format and purpose of the games. They can act as one-time events to increase engagement, as well as regular interactive content that will not let your subscribers get bored.
Games can be published in several formats:
– Stories is a direct touch format with users, great for hosting games. Stories games require a minimum of time for action from users.
– Posts allow you to convey useful information to users. They are ideal for collecting feedback, comments, user-generated content.
Instagram provides a wealth of tools so you can get creative to the max. Everyone can come up with a fun game for their followers. And if inspiration is not enough, you can use ready-made ideas.
The best games in the posts
We’ve gathered all the TOP games for Instagram that can cheer up your followers, attract interest in the brand, the product, increase the engagement rate in the profile. Each of them you can adapt to the theme of your account and include in the content plan for the month.
Tell a story
Invite your subscribers to speak out by starting an “Anonymous…Anyone Club” on your profile. The point of the game is to invite users to tell their story related to the topic of the post, or otherwise related to your account.
If you run a personal blog, it can be any topic. For example: “How you met your soulmate,” “The most vivid impression of your life,” and so on. In the case of a commercial account, you can offer your subscribers to come up with the story of your brand, to reflect on the logo. You can hold a contest for the best story and reward active users with pleasant surprises.
The game’s mechanics allows you to collect comments and user content, communicate with subscribers. You can also hold a vote for the best story in Stories and thus raise engagement there as well.
Like-time
Give your subscribers Like-time and give each other activity. To do a like-time, post a post in your account where you ask your followers to:
– to like the post;
– write any comment;
– to give likes to three previous commenters;
– reply to commenters with “Done”.
Best photo
Invite your subscribers to choose the best photo from the carousel. This way you can learn more about their preferences, as well as gather the necessary activity to increase profile ranking.
Describe your day with emoticons.
This is another interactive that allows you to not only lure users’ activity but also to get to know them better. The mechanics of the game are simple – simply post a post where you invite your subscribers to express their emotions for the day with a few emojis.
Complete the phrase
Publish a post with a story to tell, then interrupt the narration at the most interesting place and offer your subscribers to make their fantasies about the further development of events by continuing the sentence of the previous commenter.
A detective story
Invite your subscribers to play detective, asking them to solve a mystery. You will need to create several Stories for the game. In the first one, describe the beginning of the situation. In the next, describe what happened, periodically offering your subscribers different versions of the detective protagonist’s actions.
Interactivity will help to capture the attention of the audience, make subscribers think, share their hunches, which in turn will increase the natural coverage of Stories.
Guessing by the book
The game mechanics are very simple – users write the page number and lines in the comments, and the blogger reads out the prediction for them and posts it to Stories. In this way you can:
– collect comments under the post;
– increase views of Stories;
– simply establish a friendlier rapport with their readers.
Tips and nuances
Instagram gamification is a productive way to develop your account. Thanks to the games, your followers can have a fun time with your posts. And you’ll get likes, comments, and increased engagement in return. But all of this is true only if Instagram games are put together correctly.
Consider a few tweaks for creating quality game content:
- Adapt games to your account. This article offers basic ideas for hosting games. If you want them to look organic in your profile and be useful for it, then they should be adapted to the right topic, link to your products or services.
- Correct design. Make sure that the design of the game post is not only informative but also outwardly attractive. It is recommended to add brand mentions or somehow accentuate the account owner so users know who they are playing with.
- Describe the mechanics in detail. Posting the game, make sure that you explain its mechanics clearly and understandably, and do not miss a single detail. If users are not clear how to play, they simply will not do it.
- Choose the optimal level of difficulty. Do not make your game too difficult, because few people want hours to solve your problem. Too simplified games do not look interesting. Choose a medium level of difficulty. Focus on the preference of your followers and the amount of time they are theoretically willing to devote to the games.
- Post the results promptly. Everyone wants to know who the winner is.
Instagram games are a legal and practically free way to gain your audience’s attention and entertain them. But despite all the fun, it’s worth taking the approach to creating such content seriously. It is worth engaging the skills of not only a marketer and showman but also a psychologist.
