MarketingSherpa Blog

I’ve run across a quick tactic for those of you battling to get users to engage with your Web 2.0 marketing strategies.

I recently wrote stories about companies that offer social networking services through smart phones. Two of the companies–Kiwibox and Buzzd–have rewards programs to encourage engagement.

Members are given points for using the service, inviting friends and contributing to the community. The points are redeemable for prizes. It’s a nifty way to build usage and a member base.

Ideally, users will want points and will invite their friends. Once their friends are in the network, the users will use the network more often.

Evan Tana, Management and Marketing, Loopt, a location-based mobile social network, told me that once his users have three or four friends in the network, Loopt becomes a very sticky service. So why not give them a little reward for inviting friends?

The awards programs help turn users into mini-affiliates. It’s clever, and (depending on the prizes) extremely cost-effective.

If you’ve recently added social tactics to your marketing, a little incentive program might be the perfect ice breaker to get the conversations rolling.

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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Categories: Social Networking Evangelism Community, Viral Marketing Tags: Mobile, social media, social networks, web 2.0