Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane // Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again // Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt // Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it. And, they’re all going to play on LinkedIn. Forty-four years after Peter Gabriel sang those words, gaming’s new frontier is social.
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Why does social media work?
Because we like our friends, family, and celebs more than we like news. Because our friends, family, and celebs create endless content for social platforms (mostly) for free. Because we find ways to spend two hours and twenty-three minutes per day surfing pictures, watching videos, and reading the banal stuff they write about the bananas foster they had for dessert.
It's almost impossible for any other media to compete with data-powered algorithms curating infinite free content overlayed with the greatest ad tech ever built. Scratch almost. It’s entirely impossible.
What could possibly go wrong? People could stop posting. No really.
Anticipating this, platforms have been helping us post. Facebook will post that it’s your birthday. An auto-post if you will. LinkedIn will create posts to tell everyone you know when you change jobs or when you watched a video to earn a merit badge on how to watch a video.
Despite their efforts to goad us to post and make posts for us, there’s less content from friends and family. A social sea change is changing what we see on our socials. 28% of people post less on social than they did last year. Younger folks are pulling back the most. People I asked told me that their social feeds look more and more like a giant billboard of marketing fluff. “It’s lost it’s allure.”
Forget plastics. The real money is in games. Games? How do you mean?
If you can’t get Lotte to post for Jane, how does LinkedIn get Jane to stick around? What’s brown and sticky? A stick. What’s purple and sticky? A game. A game called Queens with a purple background. LinkedIn is testing in-app games because the content costs them nothing and it’s really sticky.
The Queens game in test mode on LinkedIn.
38% of Wordle players play every day. The average Wordle player spends 12 minutes playing. Microsoft, who owns LinkedIn, knows all this. And more. Last quarter, for the first time, Microsoft made more money from games than Windows. LinkedIn made more money than games and Windows. Combined.
How do you make sudoku even more seductive? You gamify games. I’m not just playing against the machine. I’m playing for the glory of my company. Can Coke cogs finish puzzles faster than Pepsi people? How about GMs at GM versus factotums from Ford? Forget goading us to post. They’re going to challenge us to play.
LinkedIn — are you trying to seduke me? Yes. Ben plays with Mrs. Robinson. Everybody is happy again.