Design Home is one of the newest and best social networking sites for homeowners. For the uninitiated, Design Home lets you design different rooms, then other users (seemingly completely female, according to their avatars) rate them for attractiveness, which impacts your total points as a designer. The more rooms you design the more visitors you get. I believe this is a good way to market your own home because it creates brand awareness and helps the users recognize your place. With more users rating rooms, the more exposure your place gets.
Now, to make it even better, Design Home includes furniture, appliances, wall pictures, lamps and other real brands which players can vote for. I have to say I was surprised by the fact that there were over 60 real brands to choose from. But hey, that just goes to show how popular this game is and how big of a market there is for it. There are many places where users can show off their real brands and there is no limit to how many users can play and create a room. Users can also buy furniture after they have already created rooms on the site. If you want to buy furniture, then you simply have to go to the store, buy what you want, pay for it and send it back.
The way the game is set up is great: you start with a basic house, you decorate it with furniture and accessories, and once you have made it look very nice, you can challenge other users to decorate your place in a way that makes it look like real-life. The twist is, when you decorate your house in a way that is similar to real-life, the people who enter your house will have to recreate the look using stuff that is available at the store. So if they use real-life items, they will be penalized and a point will be lost. On the other hand, if they use stuff that is not available in the virtual world, or if they pick a color that is not available in the virtual world, they won’t lose points – they will simply be given a notification saying that their decorating effort did not qualify.
Now that we know how the game works, let’s talk about some of the benefits of playing home games on Facebook. First, as mentioned earlier, the concept of user acquisition – i.e., getting more members – is a key part of Facebook’s strategy to get people to visit the real estate website. Because more people will mean more customers and more revenue for the website, this means that developers need to come up with interesting challenges that will entice new members to try out their services. This is a good way to develop new games for Facebook, since most of the games will revolve around challenges and user acquisition. In fact, one of the most popular ones right now is House of Flowers, which lets players decorate a house by putting up different flower arrangements.
Another benefit of having your house designed by people who work in the real-world is that you can reach out to your target audience in a very direct manner. Since you will be representing yourself and your company in a digital space, you should make every effort to represent that real-world experience. This includes making sure that the ad copy and the home page appeal to your target audience. This means making sure that your design home page and the ads are relevant to the subject matter at hand, whether it is a real-world location, a pet, a vacation spot, etc.
Finally, creating a design home for your demographic group is great because it gives you an opportunity to show your unique selling proposition to potential members. Because this social networking website allows players to post ads on their profiles, it gives you an opportunity to show off what you have to offer. This is the reason why companies such as The Woodard and The Artistic Learning Center are building real-world collectible websites that let players design their own living spaces. Not only does this allow players to show off their art, but also gives them an opportunity to let potential customers know more about them.