​​​​Who enjoys the interaction while consuming content? Spoiler: Not just Gen Z

Who enjoys the interaction while consuming content? Who finds classical TV broadcasting a bit outdated and struggling for interaction while watching news, shows, and sports, applying to their smartphones and other mobile devices? Who adores interacting with a gamer before gaming themselves? The popular answer to this question is Gen Z, but this answer looks a bit outdated. 

When Gen Zers became a goal of entertaining companies, patterns with high levels of engagement and interactions appeared. However, patterns quickly spread around users and viewers of different ages and generations. As discussed during the ‘The Future of Content Viewing’ talk at the IBC summit this year in Amsterdam, talking about YouTube users as only young people is a mistake. That’s just a cliche; if you use it, you just avoid statistics and big data provided quite widely.

Yet, if the cause differs, conclusions stay the same and even become more critical. Suppose such a pattern is widespread and applied by various people. In that case, services and brands must meet these needs through communication strategies and product development.

Let’s look at various cases of such content viewing to realise how platforms can use this new habit for the greater good of both the business and the users.

Boost games with social interaction

There are different ways for games: from video games to iGaming, from single-player games to group and public ones. All of them can be enhanced with a high level of interaction while gaming, if we are talking about group games, and observing other players’ games, or between games, considering single-player games. This player can comment on their actions with audio or video, while other users comment on a chat with text, stickers, emojis, and gifs. Twitch, it seems like a video stream with commenting actions is a more customary and convenient approach, but we can argue that audio is much simpler. Streamers don’t need to prepare much for the technical part or, for example, their appearance; if the game is simple, they can play and comment from any place they locate in a moment. Also, their audio won’t distract users from the game when the video stream is too complete, content itself and sometimes can be very distracting from the main content we want users to pay attention to. At the same time, they can like, share, comment and respond to the streamer and the game process; this is engaging and sticky: users share their emotions here and are more likely to come back to your platform/app as they used to come back to Twitch and YouTube. 

How to do it

You can add audio or video streams with a chat to your platform with any type of game. Your gamers will provide streams to their gaming process, which will accumulate more users. Particular gamers can gather communities with the habit of consuming gaming content on your platform.

Enhance watching of sports with dynamic interactivity and after-messengers habit

Mobile-first and mobile-only audiences are growing, at the same time, the same audience watches programmes on TV because of traditions, habits, collective watching, and coverage. For example, some significant sports games and popular reality shows are broadcasted exclusively on TV. Such viewers lack attention to the TV screen and consume mobile content while watching TV. So, the goal for such an audience is to ‘keep their attention to the main content. It can be achieved with several tools. The first and primary is a second-screen approach: if viewers want to use their mobile phones while watching TV, you can provide them with this opportunity with a link to the main content. They can chat and discuss what’s going on in the main content; in this case, the second screen will be used as a community-building tool. Also, the second-screen approach helps to provide additional content for viewers, such as polls, quizzes, trivia, and bots that enhance the watching experience and focus the viewers’ attention on the content even when they would love to be distracted by their phones.

How to do it

There are simple and more complicated ways. The easiest one is to connect a big screen to a mobile phone by scanning a QR code. So, users can scan QR on a TV screen and get into the chat as a specific mobile page or into your main app with additional features, polls, and tools for communications. The next level is to connect these devices in both directions: when users get into mobile by scanning something on the big screen, then they can send something to this screen: it can be some moderated messages, stickers, or emojis, which will be shown as a feed, or poll results.

Grow retention with specific tournaments and rewards

When users play on your platform, watch something, or use your app in any other ways but regularly, spending much time there, they wish to be noticed, and they wish to be entertained. Such a desire is also connected with gaming as it is: people get used to getting rewards even for the activities they like. Because of that, you can use gamification mechanics for users by assigning them different badges and achievements. But what does it mean if they can not show off with their rewards? It returns us to the talk about the community. Even achievements work better and give more joy to their owners if other users can see them and comment. Also, users value specific and exclusive things like special stickers, emojis, or new opportunities, with the usage of tools unavailable to most other community members. Users become sticky to the service if they get something there—you don’t want to throw away something you achieve.

How to do it

You can add an opportunity for users to communicate in community chat, show their achievements there, and reward them with specific stickers. When you award users with badges, it is necessary to show the others how to get such a badge and stimulate them to take the target actions.

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There are many opportunities to give users tools and ways to communicate how they got used to doing so. Variants depend on the type of content on your platform and the results you want to achieve. However, you should remember that retention is a crucial metric for almost all platforms, and successfully integrated community-building solutions grow it in any case.

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Connect with us if you plan to integrate or develop in-app social tools for real-time communication. We will help you find the most suitable solution.