You started the new fitness program on January 2nd, after taking New Year’s Day off (of course) for one last fling with french fries. But here it mid-February and your willpower and motivation are starting to wilt like…well, like six-week-old french fries.
Social Gaming as Social Media Content Marketing
Why Join the Fitocracy?
A new fitness-themed social network claims to have the answers in keeping people from abandoning the gym. Fitocracy, which has received a lot of positive coverage over the past year in the social media blogosphere, uses gamification to create a social community that is at once competitive and supportive. A number of apps already allow users to log their workouts, but Fitocracy goes a step further by awarding points to users for tracking their fitness activities; those users can climb a series of levels by totaling a certain amount of points and reaching special achievements and quests. And all of this can be shared with the Fitocracy community via leaderboards and its social community.
Fitocracy is making a strong case for becoming the next Pinterest or Instagram. It’s a niche-based social network that can easily break into the mainstream thanks to its clever use of game-style incentives (think Foursquare for fitness lovers). But it’s also providing a very healthy exercise for businesses on how they too can target like-minded people (customers), create a community for them to share support and content, and give them something special for their time.
That is, after all, the essence of social media marketing/content marketing. Yet Fitocracy isn’t limiting itself to its social network, which is still in the beta phase and requires an invite to join. The company is using its own Facebook, Twitter and (surprise) Pinterest pages to pass along motivational sayings/photos, instructional posts and videos, healthy recipes and humorous graphics. It’s also using them to start conversations with followers by asking open-ended questions and soliciting feedback about Fitocracy.
A quick trial run of Fitocracy shows it’s easy to set up a workout log; many exercises are included in the menus but Fitocracy gives users a chance to suggest those that aren’t yet in the mix. You can share your workout results with your own networks via Facebook and Twitter, and Fitocracy is promising to hold onto your personal data with all the grip-strength needed for a 300-lb. bench press. Building that kind of user credibility/trust is key in the early stages of a startup company’s life.
I’ve reached out to Fitocracy to ask questions about their use of social media for building brand awareness and a strong user base; I’ll let you know if/when they respond. In the meantime, are you a Fitocracy user? What’s your take on it – is it fit enough to last in the social media world? Please share your thoughts in our Comments section.
Update: Fitocracy CEO/co-founder Brian Wang told me via email that in addition to Facebook, Twitter and most recently Pinterest, his company also uses Tumblr for easy-to-digest, engaging content about health and fitness. The platforms also help the community motivate its members to stay on a healthy path. “We see the highest amount of engagement and referral traffic from Facebook with Twitter coming in second,” Wang said. “Despite our relatively low activity rate on Tumblr, it’s been a great channel for us since a lot of our users cross-post their Fitocracy activity to Tumblr and then discuss it with their own communities there. It’s too early to tell how effective Pinterest will be, but our follower number is growing steadily.”
Wang also said that niche or specialty-themed networks are a natural next step for social media as Facebook and Twitter keep on growing, “and the signal-to-noise ratio deteriorates rapidly. Even the big guys understand this and hence we get things like Google Circles, Facebook Lists, etc. I could share a million things to my networks but perhaps the content is only relevant to ten percent of my peers at any given moment. If I’m interested in sharing and discussing my workouts, why broadcast it to an apathetic and tired audience when I can interact with a community that’s focused on a shared interest and thus get a much richer, more focused experience?”
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