Over the past year I’ve become more involved over at Empire Avenue. For those who don’t know Empire Avenue (or just EA to it’s players) is a social media stock market game. It operates similar to a stock market except that instead of investing in a company, you’re investing in other players to build your portfolio. Instead of using dollars, you use ‘EAVs’ (which is EA’s virtual currency).  Like in the stock market, you receive dividends from your investments. The dividends an investment makes is based on their social media activity. In addition to a persons social media activity, one way to really rock out on EA is by running missions. You can use missions to help drive up your share price, engage with other users, share content from outside EA that you’ve produced or even things you just really like from around the Internet.

What is an Empire Avenue mission?

A mission on EA is simply one way to interact with other users, I’d argue it’s one of the best way to connect with users on EA. Through them you can simply hand out gifts in the form of free EAVs, hand out stock in yourself or someone else, perform a survey, send someone to  another social platform like YouTube or Twitter, or send them to any web destination you choose. The person running the mission can select how many EAVs the completer will receive in either a fixed amount, or via a scaled amount (ex: 1,000e through 20,000e). In addition to the payout and type there are a ton of other mission related settings such as being able to target a specific ‘network’ (Google+, Facebook, etc) and interest, and set it so only people who hold shares in you can complete the mission or only people who don’t own shares in you can complete the mission. You can also direct missions at specific communities within EA. Communities are like sub-forums that exist on EA where people can get together to do just about anything you can think of. There are all sorts of communities for things from trade stock tips, having a certain set of people who often communicate with, different events that take place on the site, and so on.

How Empire Avenue Missions can help you

What we really want to know is how can a mission help me? This is straight from the FAQ on Empire Avenue “For Empire Avenue, creating Missions counts as activity, and the users who complete and comment on your Missions contribute to your ‘engagement’.

Dividends from the Empire Avenue portion are more generally based on engagement, so creating Missions, completing Missions, commenting on Missions, and having other users comment on your Missions can all contribute to Dividends, up to a point. Receiving a positive rating after having completed a Mission also contributes to your Dividend.”

The key take away from this should be ‘engagement’. Quite simply, running missions on EA drives up your engagement, which ultimately translates into helping create more dividends.  Completing missions gets you EAVs and counts as activity, which does the same. Engaging with other users through missions via feedback, comments, likes, etc amplifies this effect even more.

Here’s an example of one I ran for a site event called #FullMoonEngageMe. As you can see by the top bar this is a gift mission, which means I’m simply handing out free EAVs. The blue box on the right shows the payout for completion. Since I created this to have a scaled payout, on the right hand side you can see that the payout is between 5,000e and 10,000e. Within the text I’ve used a hashtag for the event with some details about when this event is running. I’ve also included a link to my other missions so that people can complete this one and then further engage on others should they choose.

When you run a mission you can get stats about it from your mission dashboard including things like click through rate, total impressions, details per hour, and so on (while anyone can run missions, some information is only available if you’re a paying member). If you’re approach was to promote a product, a post you’ve done, etc this can all be helpful for gaining insights into how you’ve created a greater audience for your content.

Remember when I said ‘engagement’ was the take away? Well at the bottom of your screen is the engagement on Empire Avenue itself, and this is the part I personally focus on. In this section I can see the number of completions as well as the number of comments and likes received.

This is what I consider to be the most powerful part of EA and missions because I can click through and see the individual users who did each of these actions. Through that I can invest in players who are actively participating, see missions they may be running and engage in those. I can also see who’s just taking the money and running. To be clear all anyone HAS to do is view the content, but some people will block those who don’t engage with the content from participating in future missions. I don’t do that… I prefer to just focus on the folks who engage with me on a consistent basis. Over time you’ll begin to see who are active players, you can reach out and connect with them, find them on social media platforms (for example there are circles managed on Google+, and I run a Twitter list), and buy their stock. The people who tend to play the game well (and be great investments) will play and run missions. They are also the people who engage with one another’s content both on the site and on other platforms, they’ll be the ones generous with likes and comments, as well as leaving favorable feedback for the missions you run.

Remember, dividends from the Empire Avenue portion are more generally based on engagement, so creating, completing, commenting on, and having other users comment on your missions can all contribute to dividends. The higher your Avgerage Dividends/Share the more attractive an investment you’ll be, the more attractive an investment you are the more likely people are to engage with your content. So as you can see missions are a great way to go about creating a bigger audience for your content, generate more engagement, and ultimately make you more valuable on the site.

It’s a fun game and a great way to use social media to find great content and connect with cool people. Check out #EmpireAvenue today!