Creating habitual fan behaviors on your sports platform

Serving as this first-stage Trigger, LiveLike Alerts play a crucial role in keeping fans informed and engaged with your platform. Alerts serve as timely reminders that prompt users to take action—whether it’s to tune in to a live game that’s about to begin, complete a Quest to earn points before it expires, or respond to a Poll before the results are tallied.

LiveLike Alerts can be manually sent as push notifications on a platform, or integrated with an existing push notifications provider to send our automated alerts to users from the platform. Alternatively, Alerts can be used for in-platform notifications, reminding users already using the platform to complete certain desired actions and spend more time interacting with your content.

This stage also relies on the principle of simplicity and ease of use, ensuring that the desired action is straightforward and accessible for the user. The key is to lower the barriers to entry, making it as effortless as possible for users to complete the action. This involves designing intuitive interfaces, providing clear instructions, and minimizing any potential friction points that could deter user engagement. 

The success of this stage not only relies on understanding user motivations and crafting an experience that seamlessly guides them toward the intended behavior but also ensures a smooth and frictionless process for the user.

LiveLike’s suite of tools includes access to polls, quizzes, cheer meters, predictions, emoji sliders, and AMAs, public, private and influencer live chat capabilities, and quests tied to platform rewards, each designed to engage users and give them quick, easy ways to interact with platform content. Interacting with LiveLike widgets, live chats or quests is quick, easy and enjoyable, and typically results in a user’s accumulation of some kind of reward, such as virtual currency, badge status, or real rewards like gift cards or discount codes. 

This ease of use and known benefit causes users to feel productive, incentivized, and engaged when interacting with widgets, without taking up too much of their time or effort. The understanding of a reward and the ease of performing the action—whether it’s clicking to answer a poll, responding to a chat group, or completing a quest—satisfies the trigger, making users more likely to continue engaging with the platform.

Needless to say, the anticipation of any reward, whether recurring or variable, is an incentive for users to continue logging on to a platform. In fact, a report by the Pew Research Center found that 49% of users returned to apps more frequently when they knew they would be rewarded for their actions. 

However, unlike typical feedback loops, which become predictable and thus, unexciting over time, the Hook Model thrives on variability to create desire and engagement. According to Eyal, when the outcome is uncertain, our brains release more dopamine, increasing focus, excitement and motivation.

LiveLike’s loyalty rewards system harnesses the power of rewards and variability to incentivize user actions and build a strong sense of loyalty among sports fans. By offering a wide range of reward options for clients to incorporate—such as badges, leaderboard status, role privileges, virtual currencies, and more—our tools create an additional layer of behavior reinforcement. Users are not only motivated by the certainty of immediate rewards and progress tracking but also by the anticipation of future varied rewards, which keeps them coming back over time.

By integrating these variable rewards into our solution, LiveLike ensures users remain engaged and motivated, driving higher interaction rates, fostering lasting loyalty, and ensuring we land at our fourth and final stage of the Hook Model.

In other words, the more users put into your platform, the more willing or invested they will feel to remain loyal to the experience and return more frequently. Inviting friends, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all examples of investments users make to enhance their experience that results in the feeling of loyalty or commitment.

The longer and more frequently users interact with LiveLike widgets, the more achievements they collect that they may fear losing progress or stamina on, such as rankings on a leaderboard, status levels or badges, points earned, and quests progress. These achievements create a fear of losing progress or status, where this loss aversion, known as the “sunk cost fallacy,” keeps users returning to maintain what they’ve worked towards. 

Following this approach, LiveLike Quests enables you to motivate users toward completing certain actions that contribute to this sense of investment. Quests are sets of tasks that users must complete in order to achieve certain rewards or status levels. By introducing Quests with tasks that encourage users to explore new app features or pages, invite friends to the platform, or earn certain badges, you indirectly motivate them to invest more time or dedication to your experience.