Started in February 2010, Empire Avenue (EA) is fast becoming a popular new tool for brands and social media marketers. For readers who have yet to caught up with this Canadian-based social stock market-like game phenomenon and have absolutely no clues on what it does and how it works. Here’s a quick introduction.

Executive Summary on Empire Avenue

To put it simply, EA works like your regular Stock Exchange where brands and individual list themselves as stock profiles. Other users (Investors) invest by buying their shares using virtual money called ‘eaves’.

When a brand or individual create their EA profile, they will be prompted to link up existing social connections such as Twitter, Facebook, Blog, YouTube, LinkedIn, Foursquare etc. The initial share value is determined by a combination of their social connections, activities as well as demand for their initial shares.

Investors purchase profile’s shares in hope to either enjoy capital gains or dividend yield. Bottom line, everyone’s in it for the eaves – which can be really handy to push marketers’ agenda.

What’s in it for Marketers? 

I must admit that EA appeared to be really complicated when I first chanced upon it. Furthermore, there wasn’t much explanation available on the website.

However after substantial research and actual hands on, I came to realised that it is an amazing platform for Brands and Individuals to introduce, promote, market and eventually sell their objectives to absolute strangers. Here’s why:

1. Drive Traffic To Your Channels

EA offers another avenue for Marketers to pimp their existing social media channels to a huge group of audiences. As share value increases, the profile will garner more investors and curious onlookers who will visit the profile’s connections to check them out before pumping in their eaves.

This inevitably lead to capturing new consumers, generating greater brand or product awareness and enhancing web traffic for marketers.

2. Creates A Community Of Advocates

The rise and fall of share prices is dependent on the profile ongoing social engagement, and the trading activities of their shareholders. Brands and individuals have to continuously engage their social networks to elevate their share prices and attract more investors.

Having said that, it also means that investors believed in the Brand or Individual’s growth potential and have an interest to help them push their messages out onto various social media channels.

EA allow Marketers to sent special announcements, invitations, advance notice of upcoming promotions to their investors at very attractive prices (in eaves).

3. Get More Actions From Your Numbers

Having 1 billion fans on your page looks really impressive but how many of your fans are actually engaged? Let’s take Singtel as an example. The company has 124,024 likes but only 4,035 ‘people talking about this’, this works out to only 3.25%.

Here’s how companies can use EA to get more actions. Everyone’s on the game to earn and garner more eaves through either capital gains or dividends. Eaves are highly sought after because they fuel ‘Missions’. (e)RJFRASCA is offering 2,000 eaves to 14 EA Users who are willing to become his Facebook Fan and ‘Like’ 5 of his posts.

It’s really fun for EA Users and they will love you for it! It’s not hard to imagine other marketing objectives that EA is able to help you achieve with the right amount of eaves.

4. Enjoy Absolutely Free Advertising

EA allows Marketers to create Pay Per Click Promotional Advertisements fuelled solely on eaves! Absolutely free advertising!

5. Tells You Where More Work Is Required

Remember that profile stocks are linked to their respective social media connections? EA grades profiles on the activities that goes on for each network you use. The scores will allow marketers to have a clear picture of which social media channels are doing well and which has been neglected.

Because a low score in one social media channel can bring down the profile’s share value and make people think twice about investing, there is immediate incentive for your team to work harder on that weak link.

Before I go, just to gentle reminder to buy my shares (e)AspirantSG. You won’t regret it. 😛

You may also like to check out my posts on other interesting social media topics here.