Empire Avenue turns Social Media into a stock market and allows people to buy and sell stock in your personal brand.

It’s part part game, part promotional channel, and part measurement tool.  

The Game

There’s a score involved: your stock price. You want to have the highest stock price possible. The way you do that is to be active and social media and get other people on Empire Avenue to buy your stock using “eaves”. That’s Empire Avenue’s currency.

How do you get people to buy? By being a social media star and telling people to do it. Okay, maybe that’s how social media celebrities pull it off.

I sold the bulk of my stock in the beginning simply by connecting every social network possible. Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Blogs, Instagram… all that’s missing is WordPress.com. (I have self-hosted blogs so I don’t have a WordPress.com account.)

When you connect all of these networks your stock price rises. And when it starts rising from the beginning, everybody wants to jump on that stock. Enjoy it while it lasts, though. Once your “new member smell” wears off, you need to actually do a little work to get additional sales. 

First, you need to make sure your stock’s dividend is good. Eaves are the thing that make this online world go round, and the way to introduce more eaves into the system is by collecting daily dividends off of the stock you buy. The higher the dividend, the more profitable it is to hold on to that stock, and buy more of it. 

How do you get your dividend per share up? By being active in social media. Upload pictures to Instagram. Tweet them. Facebook them. Flickr them. Upload YouTube videos. Rate them. Comment on them. Post on Google+. Check in on Foursquare. Write blog posts.  All of these things feed back into the Empire Avenue monster and makes it grow. The more it grows, the more you earn for other people. The more you earn, the more people will want to buy your stock. Dividend per share is King. 

Just because you have a great dividend per share doesn’t mean people will automatically flock to buy your stock. They have to know you exist. You need to fire a shot across their bow and get their attention. The most effective way to do this is to buy their stock first. 

That’s right, spend a little to get a little. Each time you buy stock, it notifies that person of how many shares you purchased. And when you make a purchase, eaves are added to the account of the person you bought from. That gives them eaves to invest back in your stock.

The more you buy, the more they’ll buy, and the more they buy the more your stock goes up. And the wheel goes ’round.

The Promotional Channel

When people start buying your stock, you’ve simultaneously begun building a new audience. Empire Avenue gives you tools such as “shareholder mail” that you can use to reach your shareholders and tell them more about yourself, and what you do. Empire Avenue also hosts many community groups for you to join and connect with other members who live near you, or have the same interests in you.

Recently Empire Avenue introduced a new feature called missions. With missions you can offer to pay eaves to Empire Avenue members for doing what you ask of them. For example, you could offer 1,500 eaves to each member who clicks your Facebook page link and likes it. Or you could offer 2,000 eaves for each member who follows you on Twitter.

It’s a great way to kick start engagement on your social networking channels. 

Measurement Tool

One of the great pieces of Empire Avenue is the measurement tools. Empire Avenue has some great charts and metrics to help give you a sense of how effective your social media channels are.   The main measurement Empire Avenue shows you is the quality of your content vs your audience. 

There are other tools out there from other sites that give you a deeper look at your individual networks, but for a quick glance across all of your channels, Empire Avenue offers a pretty nice tool for free.

Bottom Line

Empire Avenue is another social media channel you should consider. But like most social media channels, you will only get out what you put in.