How to build word of mouth sharing into your game

A lot of people tend to think of marketing a game as the bit that comes after it’s built. The bit where you buy a few adverts and do a bit of PR. If you’ve read our blog before you’ll know that we think marketing happens long before the game is done and should actually happen as you are building.

One of the most powerful types of promotion is word of mouth marketing, getting people to talk about your game. It’s quite obvious really, how many times have you gone to see a film, read a book or tried a restaurant based on the recommendation of a friend? Word of mouth marketing is all about encouraging and helping people recommend your game to their friends.

Whilst a lot of players will promote your game if prompted or asked to, if you offer an incentive for doing so you will see much higher rates of advocacy. If you have some form of in-game currency this can be as simple as throwing a few extra coins in their direction as reward for their action. If you don’t employ an in-game currency then you can still incentivize player sharing, but you may have to think harder about how you do it. It may be that you give away wallpapers or concept art, XP points, or unlock new parts of a map or items.

Below I’ve identified 5 mechanics for encouraging people to talk about your game.

Score sharing

People are competitive. It’s one of the reasons we like playing games, to beat other people. We are also competitive with ourselves. We love to beat our own high scores. If your game has a point scoring mechanic, be sure to let people share their scores online. Your best bet is to focus on sharing through facebook or Twitter since these are the most adopted social networks. Posting to Twitter is simple since the API allows you to contain the tweet in the URL. If you want post to both Twitter and Facebook from a mobile game then integrating a platform such as OpenFeint could be a simpler process. It also gives you immediate access to functionality such as high scores. That said, requiring a login to a third party application will be a barrier to your more casual players

Asking for a review

Especially for mobile platforms, having high ratings is a key thing users will check before downloading games, so having a large number of high ratings is a great way to help increase your downloads. Even though a lot of people will like a game, and rating it is a very simple process, very few people actually think to do it themselves, it’s not part of their thought process. So something as simple as a polite prompt is a great way to encourage them to do so -it’s not particularly obtrusive and a simple prompt is all most people need to go ahead and rate. Our advice is always to let the user play the game a while before asking them to rate the game, there’s nothing more frustrating than downloading a game and immediately being asked to rate it.

You could also consider encouraging people to rate your game with some form of reward for doing so, such as in-game currency if you have one. Remember to be careful how you ask, you don’t want to imply that you’re bribing people for positive reviews!

Challenging / playing with a friend

Humans are very social animals, we tend to seek out other people to talk too, and indeed, play games with. Social games have capitalised on this massively, with the likes of Farmville amassing huge numbers of players quickly by tapping into people’s social networks (read spamming their feeds). And as I mentioned earlier, people are also quite a competitive bunch. These two things combined means that mechanics that try to pit friends against each other, such as setting a high score and then challenging your friends to beat it, are a fantastic way to get people telling their friends about your game.

Liking / following

We’ve talked in the past about the importance of social media and specifically creating account of social networking sites. It’s a great way to give loyal fans additional content and drive engagement with your game brand. However, it’s also a great way to gain access to your fans’ friends. Every time one of your players talks about you on Twitter, or likes a wall post you write on Facebook there is a chance that their friends will see this. Provide fans with great additional content on social networks and they might even share it themselves. Do it well and you can create an army of advocates for your game, recruit new players through their actions.

Member get member

Lastly, and probably the oldest form of word of mouth marketing, is member get member. The principle is simple, you reward existing users for going out and recruiting new players. This can be through extra experience, in-game currency or bonus items – whatever reward your game can offer basically. World of Warcraft do this very well, offering incentives such as 2 free months for the friend, bonus experience when the user and friend play together, and unique bonus items for the user for recruiting a friend.

All in all, word of mouth can be a fantastic way to drive new players to your game. However, it’s important to remember that with an exception or two, these features and mechanics work best when they are properly integrated into your game, rather than tacked on as an afterthought, and definitely not to the detriment of the actual game. They should also add something to the user experience – this doesn’t have to be literally with a reward (though that obviously helps) but through tapping into human phycology (being social, being competitive).

We’ve included 5 main example here, but there are dozens of variations and combinations out there. Let us know in the comments which ones you’re using, and how they’re working. We’d also love to hear from you if you now are going to incorporate these in your game in the future.