The land grab to add gambling games to social networks is fully underway. Facebook will soon be full of gambling products for real money as well as virtual currencies.
With social such a buzzword, and a mass of users on social networks, this is probably a great way for operators to please the markets, make some revenue and increase brand awareness. However many gaming operators are misunderstanding what it means to be social.
Social is not just about adding your products to Facebook and monetising that established user base.
Social is also about making your products more personal, more mobile, more rewarding, stickier, and obviously adding more social interactions.
This social stickiness can increase session times, make products more shareable and viral, and ultimately stir more brand loyalty in your users as your site becomes the focus for your gambling social network of friends.
Sports betting is a great example of this. Social and user-generated content is gold dust to operators but these discussions don't necessarily happen on mainstream social networks. Why aren't operators positioning themselves to be the sites these social interactions happen on?
That brings me to another bugbear. My gambling network and my social network are not the same nor a subset of each other. I am happy to share my gambling activities with my friends who bet, I am even happy to share gambling conversations with strangers on forums, but I don't necessarily want to talk about gambling with my Facebook friends who may include my disapproving spouse/partner/children etc.
I may want to talk about gambling success with my non-gambling friends but I definitely don't want to share all my photostream with my tipster community.
So there lies the separation between the ideas. The gamblification of social networks is happening now but not enough focus is being placed on the socialisation of gambling.
David Sargeant is the founder of iGaming Ideas which aims to add innovation to the sports betting and i-gaming sector by helping new ideas get to market (igamingideas.com).
