Social Media Tracker: Should operators be focusing more on promoting safer gambling through social media?

For any operators in the UK, Safer Gambling Week is a huge deal. Not only do operators need to ensure they are promoting their safer gambling tools across their website but they must also ensure that players are getting the support they need.

While many operators focus their efforts during the designated month each year in November, others are using their social media channels to highlight the issues across the entire year. Here, we look at why promoting safer gambling is so important and how some operators are changing the lives of players.

What is Safer Gambling Week?

Safer Gambling Week was set up to help operators across the UK and Ireland to encourage their players to make use of the tools at their disposal. While operators may be focused on driving traffic to their site and increasing deposits throughout the year, this designated week helps them to reflect and help players.

Safer Gambling Week takes place in November each year with this year’s event beginning on 1^st November. Across the week, there are tons of events, resources and marketing materials for operators to make use of.

For any licensed operators, there isn’t really a choice when it comes to taking part as the promotion of responsible gambling falls within the licensing obligations set out by the UKGC.

With this in mind, we ask – is just one week in the year enough for promotion of safer gambling?

Why is promoting safer gambling so important?

According to a recent YouGov survey, there are around 280,000 problem gamblers in the UK. This figure might be quite shocking to some but to others, it won’t come as a surprise. GambleAware recently revealed that as many as 7% of adults, or 3.6 million people have been negatively affected by someone else’s gambling problem.

Some believe that a lack of awareness of gambling problems is the root of this problem and this could be true. Gambling is often seen as a social activity and this results in people joining their friends at a local bingo hall or going on a trip to a casino in Las Vegas.

Of course, with online gambling, there are even greater risks as isolation can lead to a huge loss of money and addiction. With the recent lockdown and issues surrounding the pandemic, the UKGC stepped in but some operators are taking it one step further.

Case study: Tombola

Tombola is a leading UK bingo and casino brand with players across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They have a strong community of players who support each other, alongside chat monitors who have a unique presence in the chatrooms.

On social media, tombola has cemented a strong following with over 198K likes on Facebook. While tombola could use this to their advantage and focus solely on pushing their promotions to their large audience, they are focusing their efforts on safer gambling promotion once again.

At the beginning of August, tombola spent an entire week promoting ‘Safeplay Week’. This was well received by players who engaged in the social media posts and spoke of how they were using the features.

Across the entire week, the tombola team hosted live quizzes, on-site giveaways, in-chat events and more. They focused a lot on the safeplay features that they offer including deposit limits, stake limits and net deposit information. They also created a post that asked players to comment with an interesting fact to help them get to know the community or ‘support system’.

The live quiz that took place on 5 August had a lot of engagement. There were over 4.5K comments from players who wanted to get involved. The prizes were simply goody bags but we found that this campaign worked very well.

The team at tombola was not under any obligation to host this Safeplay Week but had chosen to do so in order to protect players. It is clear that they are using their strong social media presence to allow players to enjoy the games and avoid any serious issues.

How can operators focus more on this throughout the year?

It can be tempting to avoid any conversations about responsible or safer gambling as it can potentially have an effect on the number of deposits that players make. However, we believe that operators in the UK should be spending more time on promoting a safer experience for players. Yes, Safer Gambling Week may take place at the end of each year but this simply isn’t enough.

There are tons of ways that operators can focus their social media content on responsible gambling outside of Safer Gambling Week. New players aren’t always aware of the tools that they can use and simple graphics can help with this. Additionally, video content is strong on social media and this can work as a way of informing players of the risks of gambling.

Additionally, we believe that Q&A sessions with experts can go a long way when it comes to promoting safer gambling across the entire year.

Take a leaf out of tombola’s book and spend more time encouraging players to enjoy gambling again, rather than spending more than they can afford. If we all work together, we can ensure the industry is sustainable.

Sharon McFarlane is the managing director of Digital Footprints – a digital marketing agency that specialises in igaming. She has eight years’ experience in the industry and has contributed regularly to industry magazines and conferences sharing her expertise on all things digital marketing. Her company (www.digital-footprints.co.uk) offers an outsourced solution for igaming businesses when it comes to content marketing, social media, UX design, website design, branding and conversion rate optimisation.