Is this the end of classic SMM? How Gift Fest uses gamification to keep users hooked

I always thought promo campaigns and giveaways on social media were just a pure expense for brands: money spent to attract leads. But after watching the Gift Fest event in Telegram, I realized the game has changed.

Instead of just running a simple giveaway, they’ve turned the whole thing into a casual merge game. You farm coins, buy tickets for raffles, and try to progress.The really smart part? They added a Premium Pass for 599 Telegram Stars. It unlocks a paid 50-level track, gives you a 3x coin reward in the endgame, and removes all the limits.

They basically took the most aggressive retention and monetization mechanics from mobile gaming and dropped them straight into a marketing event inside a messenger app. And judging by the number of people in their official channel, users are not only playing, many are probably spending money to get more tickets and progress faster.

We’ve spent years trying to get people to just like a post, and these guys managed to make users pay to participate more actively in their promo campaign.

Pretty wild case of how SMM is evolving.

Comments

modulus3029•3 months ago•2

It’s a cool strategy, but man, the overhead for managing events + social + content is insane lol. For a solo founder or a small team trying to keep up with this new SMM, you almost have to automate the boring stuff. I’ve seen people use Runable or similar AI agents to handle the content variations and reports so they can spend more time actually talking to the community during events like Gift Fest. If you spend all day just scheduling posts, you miss the actual social part of the job

ContentBatchPro•3 months ago•1

This is a really sharp observation. What Gift Fest did is essentially apply the endowment effect from behavioural economics to a marketing campaign. Once users have invested time farming coins, they feel ownership over their progress and are far more likely to spend to protect it. The genius is that the cost of participation is attention and time first, money second. That ordering matters enormously. Traditional giveaways ask for money or a follow upfront. This model inverts it. For most small businesses, the lesson to extract is simpler: any campaign that makes your audience feel invested in an outcome, even a small poll or a vote for the next product post, will outperform passive content every time.

brueluel•3 months ago•1

Is the audience for games in Telegram actually that huge? I always thought it was just a messenger for crypto bros and news channels

Chemical-Anywhere615•3 months ago•1

Wait, if users are buying this Premium Pass with real money (Stars) to get better chances at winning an iphone or cash... doesn’t that break gambling or lottery laws?

LeadingAd6679•3 months ago•1

tbh it’s not really the “end” of classic SMM, it’s just shifting.

people are getting tired of overly polished, brand-heavy content. stuff that feels more native, creator-style, or even slightly raw is performing better now

also brands are moving toward faster content cycles testing more ideas, adapting quickly. tools like runable help with that kind of volume since you can produce different formats (images, carousels, short clips) without slowing down the whole workflow

ActualInternet3277•3 months ago•1

Selling a Battle Pass for participation in your own promo campaign is insane... but honestly, it’s genius insane

ABDULKALAM_497•3 months ago•1

The real genius is flipping the cost model where users fund the campaign instead of the brand absorbing it. That is a monetization shift disguised as a promo

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SettingAccording8986•3 months ago•1

Lol, I’m not even a marketer, but I’m currently sitting in a lecture merging spools of thread in Gift Fest. The mechanics are insanely addictive. I’m not even thinking about the prizes anymore - I just need to clear space on the board. The game designers know exactly what they’re doing

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