ali birston's blog

When it comes to incentives, nothing beats winning a $50,000,000 Lotto Max jackpot. When I stumbled across this particular post from Be Remarkable on my Facebook newsfeed I was struck with how simple, yet genius the idea was.  Within seconds of seeing my friend had liked the post, I followed suit and made a comment in the hopes of sharing in the prize.

The concept was simple: purchase a lottery ticket and if it happened to be the winning ticket the money would be shared with fans who engaged with the photo. But most importantly, the call to action was strong and beyond easy for users: just like and comment on the photo and you could share in part of the $50 million jackpot.

Sounds simple, but the results were pretty remarkable. Within a matter of three hours they had well over 6,000 likes, close to 4,000 comments and over 250 shares. Not only is that alone impressive, but what strikes me as the most strategic part of the campaign is how many people it has the potential to reach. I had never heard of Be Remarkable (a community for BC Credit Unions) before an old friend happened to like it and it appeared on my news feed, which I’m sure was the case among many diverse networks of people all across British Columbia and beyond.

It just go to show that overcoming the barrier to engagement on social media really comes down to appealing to consumers’ most basic desires. Generic calls to action may generate responses from a select few active “Creators”, however, in order to foster engagement within the broader community of social media “Spectators”, a good tactic is to ensure posts are simple, but with a clear incentive.

Although I never ended up getting a share in the jackpot, I can’t argue the fact that this was hugely beneficial for BC Credit Unions in terms of awareness and social media buzz. However, if the true aim of social media is to generate genuine engagement and develop meaningful relationships with their community of users, then this just seems like a cheap bribe.