Diving Deep into Social at NCEL
- Insights Online
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
The North Carolina Education Lottery provides a detailed look into their social strategies and engagement.
By Katie Maynard, Digital Engagement Coordinator, NCEL
Published June 17, 2025
At the N.C. Education Lottery (NCEL), our social media channels allow us to take our news, information, and stories straight to more than 170,000 dedicated followers on five platforms. We get to have conversations about all things lottery. We receive lots of questions from players, listen to concerns, and respond to all of them. We get a lot of feedback − some of it tough, but a lot of it love and applause. Plus, we’re getting engagement that we cannot get anywhere else. That would be 603 average engagements – reactions, comments, shares – per post in our most recent social media benchmark report.
Our social media is just fun, just like the lottery. We’re doing promotions, giveaways, drawings, mini-games, live video. Social media creates a major channel for NCEL’s marketing, advertising and public relations in supporting our games, promotions and the good cause we serve in North Carolina – education. When North Carolinians say their lottery is friendly and fun, a big factor in that good reputation is the success of our social media channels in engaging with our players in such a positive way.
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Our Social Team
Our Advertising team manages all our social media accounts. One person moderates social on weekdays, but others will assist, as necessary. The Advertising team works on a rotating schedule for weekend coverage. Our Communications and HR teams handle our LinkedIn channel.
Platforms
NCEL uses Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and LinkedIn for posting organic content. We also advertise on Snapchat. We post our most visually-compelling content on Facebook and Instagram, and use X regularly for sharing stories about winners or announcements about new games, promotions, etc.
Facebook. We post multiple times a day on Facebook. We share big winner stories when those winners conduct an interview with our Communications team, when they let us take a photo, or both. We share updates about ongoing game promotions, the ending of games, Lucke-Rewards drawings, and more. We also conduct monthly promotions through Facebook. At the end of each month leading into the launch of our new scratch-offs on First Tuesday, we share Mr. First Tuesday promotion posts to engage fans to comment for a chance to win the new scratch-off tickets. We also conduct monthly promotional giveaways of scratch-off tickets. Sometimes these giveaways will be comment-based promotions and other times we direct players to a microsite to enter. During fair and festival event season, we regularly conduct coordinated giveaways with our Marketing team to give away tickets to events we sponsor.
Instagram. Over the course of a month, we average about one post a day on Instagram. Some days we share multiple posts. And other days no posts go up. On Instagram, we share a lot of the same content as Facebook, except for winner stories that do not have a winner photo. We feature on Instagram big winner stories with photos. We post our monthly Mr. First Tuesday giveaways on this platform as well. As long as the promotion does not require players to post a screenshot in the comments (which we do occasionally for Facebook), we share the same promotion content on both Facebook and Instagram.
X. We post on X several times a day, depending on how many winners we receive in the previous day. This platform is used for information releases. We post daily big winners from yesterday’s drawings, any relevant announcements, and winner stories when big winners come in to claim. North Carolina media are keen followers of us on X. The alerts on big wins and winners result in an increase in positive coverage of lottery news.
YouTube. We post an average of three to eight videos per month on our YouTube channel. We share our latest TV commercials and First Tuesday videos each month; a video or two from one of the big winner stories created by our Communications team; and beneficiary content and commercials from our Moving NC Students Forward campaign.
LinkedIn. We post on LinkedIn a few times a month. Our LinkedIn content features lottery news, job opportunities, our partnerships with education groups, and beneficiary stories on how the lottery benefits education programs in our state.
Our social media team stays engaged over the weekend. Weekend duty rotates around Advertising team members. This ensures someone monitors conversations and can post about winners each day of the week. We respond directly to player comments and complaints daily. We provide support and answers to questions where we can, or direct players and public to other channels, such as our Online Play customer service team for technical support with our website or mobile app if needed.
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goal with social media is to provide relevant content to our players about all facets of the lottery: big winners, impact on education, special offers and promotions, new games, and more. We strive to maintain a welcoming environment where we can engage with players across the state and answer questions, congratulate them on wins, and foster conversation about the lottery.
We measure success through metrics tracking, where we look at number of posts per platform, impressions and reach, and follower count. We track our performance, producing a quarterly social media benchmark against lotteries that we consider our peers. The benchmark compares total followers, engagement per post, activity, and audience growth. We also view success through the number of comments or entries received in a social media promotion. Entries into any one giveaway range from hundreds to 10,000+ entries. Our recent Win-I Golf promotion collected 32,000 entries over two months.
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Our Holiday Scratch-Off promotion for the 2024 holiday season performed exceptionally well. We produced several posts over the course of a month-and-a-half and hid letter clues in each post. At the end of the scavenger hunt, players could combine all the clues to form a code that would give them Lucke-Rewards points. They could then comment with the final code on the final post for a chance to win an assortment of holiday scratch-offs. Players loved finding the clues in each post.
Our Fire vs. Ice Live event on Facebook Live, conducted in 2023, generated lots of engagement. This event, supporting our Fire and Ice scratch-off tickets, highlighted the dueling nature of the games’ theme with a video showing a large block of ice melting. We invited players to join the event and answer trivia questions for a chance to win scratch-off tickets. Those who waited until the end and saw the official time when the “Fire vs. Ice” logo fell from the block of ice could enter that time into a microsite for a chance to win a $1,000 cash prize. We received over 100,000 comments during the live event and over 14,000 fans tuned in live to watch.
User-Generated Content
We’ve done a few promotions that asked players to generate content. One provided an AR filter that added a Winners Club jacket or background to the player as they took a photo. Players could use the filter on Facebook or Instagram stories, save their picture, and share it for a chance to win scratch-offs.
In our Winners Club Caption Contest, we posted a series of four different comic illustrations and asked players to comment with their best caption on each image for a chance to win an assortment of that month’s scratch-offs. After the promotion ended, we posted a showcase of the best captions provided by our players.
For our Carolina Panthers Fan Fest in 2023, we set up a booth at Bank of America stadium during the event. There, we asked players to share a photo with the hashtag #1PanthersFan and tag our account to receive a free Panthers scratch-off ticket.
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On the Horizon
Our Moving NC Students Forward platform, launched in 2023, creates new opportunities for sharing information about how the money raised by the Lottery supports education. With these real examples of how lottery funds have benefited the lives of North Carolinians, we can enhance player education and awareness about beneficiary efforts. We have created regional video content and shared this through our social channels to highlight how lottery dollars have made a difference in communities throughout our state. We plan to continue expanding this project and find new ways to engage and interest players in beneficiary stories both with new TV commercials but especially through our social media channels.
We recently started advertising on Snapchat. We’re excited about future opportunities to advertise on that platform and other platforms, such as TikTok, that appeal to younger audiences.
We plan to add a new brand ambassador position to our Communications team. This position will bring a lottery personality to provide engaging stories through videos and with live social media events. This should produce great new content for our social media pages highlighting games, promotions, prizes, winners, and beneficiaries.
Trends Worth Watching
The social media landscape undergoes continuous change and evolution. So does our social media program. One big trend we’re monitoring is the popularity of reels and short-form videos. We’re working to incorporate more 9:16 video content into our Instagram content strategy. We’re observing what other lotteries and brands are doing with their Instagram reels.
Specifically, we would love to do some reels content using trendy approaches (i.e., “Come with me while we do ___”) to highlight some Lottery operations and behind-the-scenes content to boost transparency and understanding for our players. Our new brand ambassador will help with that.
In a similar vein, we’d love to be able to get onto TikTok to help reach younger audiences, as they are largely on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram more than Facebook and X. Currently, we’re unable to have TikTok on government devices and unable to advertise there either. We’re hoping this changes in the future and we can amp up our short-form video strategy to include TikTok as well.
We’re looking for the next “Twitter.” Will the new Threads and BlueSky platforms gain enough momentum to warrant us including one or both in our social media program? And who’s not watching AI? We’re not there yet, but we’re wondering what possibilities AI could open to us with promotions, giveaways and content.
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