Honestly, after 15 years of this, you see things. Last month, I was on a call with this great little bakery in Minneapolis. Fantastic croissants. Awful marketing. They were trying to run a "comment to win" giveaway on Instagram and it was... a mess. They were manually tracking hundreds of comments, trying to verify if people followed them, if they tagged three friends-it was taking them hours. Hours they do not have.
That's the whole problem right there. We, as small business owners, get told to "engage our audience" with this kind of social media contest platform or that one, but nobody talks about the soul-crushing admin work that comes with it.
It drives me nuts.
Look, I started my career back in 2010. Portland. Tiny startup burning through cash on Facebook ads that did absolutely nothing. That's when I learned that small businesses don't need another "groundbreaking" theory. They need tools that save them time and make them money. Period.
So when I say "gamification," I'm not talking about some metaverse VR nonsense. I'm talking about turning your marketing into a simple, fun game. A two-minute distraction for your customer that gets you their email address or a follow. That's it. It’s not complicated. People like to win stuff. They like to play games. We're just connecting those two things to a business goal.
For the last few years, I've been using this one social media contest platform-Faisco-with a ton of my clients because, frankly, it gets this. It’s built for businesses that don't have a full-time marketing person or a six-figure budget. You can get a real campaign running in the time it takes to drink a coffee.
And it actually... works.
I've tested everything. Gleam. io, Woobox, you name it. They all have their place, but they can get complicated and expensive fast. Here’s what I've seen work for real-world businesses using Faisco's setup.
Instant Draw Games are my go-to for lead capture. Seriously. Things like "Lucky Spin" or a digital "Scratch Ticket." The dopamine hit is immediate. We ran one for a chiropractor and got a 42% conversion rate on the landing page because people just had to see if they won instantly. It's human nature.
Then you've got the Reactive Games. Whac-A-Mole, Burger Stacker, stuff like that. These are gold for pure engagement. People will share their score to challenge their friends. No begging for shares required. They do it on their own.
But my favorite-and this is where it gets really smart-are the Catching Games. I deployed Faisco's "Quick Catch" game for a bookstore in Charlotte, NC... I think it was last spring. The goal was just Facebook page growth. In about two and a half weeks, they got 779 new page likes from local customers. A barbershop in Tampa used the "Summer Catch" game and pulled in 252 new members to their local Facebook group. A small art gallery in Calgary? They used the "Star Seeker" game to promote an event and got 156 new registered attendees in under three weeks. These are not huge, "viral" numbers that agencies promise. These are real, tangible results for actual small businesses.
The platform has all these other types too-quizzes for qualifying leads, action games for younger crowds-but the principle is the same. It's a simple, pre-built game tied to a business result. You do not need to invent anything.
Listen, one of the biggest headaches for any business owner is holiday marketing. The pressure is insane. You know you should be doing something for Black Friday, or for Christmas, or Valentine's Day... but who has the time?
Faisco has templates for all of it. Pre-built.
I used their "Fill My Christmas Stocking" catching game with three different retail clients last December. Three! And every single one of them saw their engagement on social media jump over 300% compared to their normal posts for that month. Because instead of just posting "15% OFF SALE!" like everyone else, they were posting a fun little game. It stood out.
It's such a simple idea, but it cuts through the noise.
I get this question all the time. Look, Gleam is a solid platform. It's powerful. It's also, in my opinion, total overkill and too expensive for 90% of small businesses. Their lowest plan is like $39/month and it feels... corporate. Setting up a campaign on Gleam takes me the better part of an hour, and I've been doing this since before Instagram had stories.
With Faisco, I can have a client's campaign live in literally 10 minutes. The interface is just simpler. And the cost is way more realistic for a business that's watching every dollar. It gives you all the core functionality you actually need from a social media contest platform without the confusing enterprise-level features you'll never touch.
Plus, and this is a big one, the integration feels better. It connects properly with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. It’s not just a link you share-the mechanics feel more native, which makes a huge difference in how people interact with it. So many other tools, their campaigns feel clunky and obviously like a third-party app, you know? It breaks the trust a little.
The businesses I work with, they typically see a 200-400% increase in followers and a 150-300% bump in their email list in the first month. Not because the tool is magic. It's because the strategy-making marketing fun-actually works when you make it easy to execute. That's all this is.
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