Gamification Management in Social Nets for Building Loyalty

The purpose of this master's thesis is to formulate recommendations on the implementation of gamification and its assessment of effectiveness in the social network “VK” for the development of audience loyalty. To achieve this goal: • In the theoretical chapter, we examined the relationship of three basic concepts: gamification, social media marketing and loyalty. The result of a literature review was the creation of a model of relationships of those 3 concepts. • In the methodological chapter, we justified the choice of social networks for our analysis, the formation of a sample of communities in VK, the choice of metrics and the choice of quantitative and qualitative methods for analyzing the downloaded data, having used not only scientific works, but also practical works. For clarity, a design methodology table was created. • In the empirical part, we confirmed the main hypotheses of the research and developed practical recommendations for the implementation and general management of gamification in social networks for the development of loyalty. It is noteworthy that these recommendations are equally applicable for different social networks. 5 main principles of gamification management are: 1. Systematic use of gamification; 2. The choice of elements of gamification based on the preferences of the audience; 3. Analysis of competing groups; 4. Testing gamification before systematic implementation; 5. Systematic monitoring of gamification and general group performance. Such a narrow specification of research is poorly understood in the scientific community. Also in practice, SMM specialists do not perform the stages of developing a gamification strategy and do not analyze active gamification. The lack of uniform standards in the analysis of game elements also complicates the process of evaluating the effectiveness of gamification. In this work, we tried to clarify these problems with the help of general recommendations, however, this topic could potentially be deepened, both in the direction of differentiating the principles of evaluating different types of communities of one social network and different social networks. Keywords: social media marketing, gamification, loyalty, social networks, engagement, communities.