Social Strategies in Detail
- Insights Online
- Jun 17
- 37 min read
Updated: Jun 20
By NASPL Insights Online
Published June 17, 2025
Going beyond the basics of managing social media and choosing appropriate platforms for content, we asked lotteries about their goals and successes, experience with influencers and user-generated content, if applicable, and if they have any exciting new projects on the horizon. Their edited responses follow.
Arizona Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our social media goals this year focused on expanding our influencer program, showcasing winner stories, and bringing the excitement of the Arizona Lottery games to life. We’ve successfully increased our influencer presence, engaged in local collaborations, emphasized fun video content, and frequently shared winner updates. A particularly successful initiative was the launch of our Willie’s Wares merchandise line, which included sending merchandise boxes to local influencers and hosting giveaways on our platforms. We also partnered with retailers for a Willie’s Wares Scavenger Hunt at convenience stores statewide, and announced it through our social platforms. We aim to build on these achievements by discovering new ways to engage our players with fun, exciting content and community initiatives.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We have built out our influencer marketing program in the past year and have seen tremendous success activating influencers for various campaigns. On one of our smaller campaigns, a new approach we took this year was to activate influencers on Instagram Stories only. We sent Cash Boxes to influencers, asking them to post reaction videos on their story. We were able to make a compilation video of their content that performed well, and luckily was cost-effective too!
On the Horizon
In the past year, we’ve seen recent success with localized brand partnerships. We collaborated with a local record store chain, Zia Records, on Record Store Day to promote our Rock Out Scratchers and give away goodies to our players. We’re excited to lean into this approach in the next year and find new ways to engage with our community and local brands.
ADVERTISEMENT
Arkansas Scholarship Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals are engagement and awareness, and success is measured by the number of engagements (likes, shares, comments, etc.) Facebook contests consistently perform well. One Facebook Live contest during a game launch in 2022 generated over 20,000 comments within 25 minutes. Another Facebook contest giving away tickets to a University of Arkansas football game generated 178 shares. Posts with puzzles, games or opportunities for players to comment tend to outperform other content types, so these are prioritized in content plans for Facebook, which is our largest audience.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We are not currently using user-generated content or influencers. ASL and our partner advertising agency CJRW previously ran influencer campaigns in 2022, but due to Meta’s branded content policies, influencer partnerships have been paused for now.
On the Horizon
In 2023, we partnered with SG Digital Academy to identify specific player segments using the Optimove platform to optimize their acquisition and retention strategies on Facebook. Through a direct Optimove-Meta integration, ASL built a custom audience based on players’ purchase history. Using this information, we reached existing players with retention-specific creative and built a lookalike audience to attract new players into their loyalty program. While this project is not “new,” the data continues to be beneficial in targeting audiences on other platforms such as Snapchat.
In addition, CJRW is always excited about creating content for big holidays like Halloween and Christmas. These moments provide an opportunity to get more creative with themes, visuals, and engagement tactics.
ADVERTISEMENT
Atlantic Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals are to establish brand trust, build community, and increase product education. On LinkedIn, our most-engaged posts over the past year were posts focused on company culture and employee initiatives like volunteerism, employee events, and diversity and inclusion training. On Meta platforms, our most-engaged posts featured winners, win celebrations, and their stories.
On the Horizon
We’re definitely leaning into the more short-form video format that many platforms have been prioritizing recently.
British Columbia Lottery Corp.
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goal is awareness, which we measure by reach and impressions. Secondary goals are link clicks and engagement. We have found Facebook link posts to winner stories perform well, with some reaching more than one million people organically. We have also found that Instagram Reels from winner celebration events perform well, especially if the winner is eager to participate in the content.
California Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our main marketing objectives and how we measure success are through awareness, positive sentiment, audience engagement and follower growth. Expanding playership and increasing the frequency of play from our occasional players is an ongoing strategic business goal for California. Paid social plays a key role in that effort as it allows us to reach a broad audience of California adults and keeps lottery top of mind with less frequent players. Our paid social media campaigns optimize towards reach (the number of unique individuals that see our ads) and frequency (the number of times an ad is seen). We see millions of impressions and views across our paid campaigns and influencer content, and paid social continues to be one of our most nimble and highly effective digital marketing channels.
On organic social, since we talk mainly to our frequent core players, engagement is an important metric for us because the audience is further down the marketing funnel. We are talking to California Lottery fans and have created a sense of community with these players. We also measure reach and impressions on organic social to understand how the creative itself is performing.
We have had several social media posts that have been extremely high performing, most notably when we post about a big jackpot winner here in California. Winner awareness continues to be the most well-received content on our social channels and has grown in popularity over the past few years due to introducing new creative assets and increasing the variety of messaging beyond only jackpot wins.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We currently only leverage user-generated content during jackpot fever where we re-share content from players that are playing the high jackpots in our Instagram Stories. We have a robust influencer marketing program, which we run at different times throughout the year. Influencer marketing is an extremely valuable and important tactic within our larger marketing program to help reach new and different audiences.
On the Horizon
We are staying close to the upcoming paid opportunities within Threads and are excited to explore that platform more. We are excited to be expanding our paid YouTube support to YouTube Shorts as well.
ADVERTISEMENT
Delaware Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
The Delaware Lottery’s social goals are to build relationships with the audience, promote our games, and highlight our presence and impact in the community. Success is measured through monthly performance reports that evaluate social KPIs to monitor trends and audience engagement. Some of our most notable posts were a $1 million Powerball winner that got 19.2k impressions; a Big Winner Reel with 57k impressions; and our 50th Anniversary Game Show Live, which generated 3.7k views and 35 comments.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We occasionally share posts that encourage followers to share photos or prompt responses to create user-generated content opportunities. We also share “Big Winner” photos of Delaware Lottery winners claiming their prizes.
On the Horizon
We’ve seen great success with our 50th Anniversary Campaign, especially with our Game Show Facebook Lives and our monthly trivia posts. We’re continuing the campaign on social media through October 2025 and continually evolving the strategy to best engage our audience. We continue to generate audience interaction on social media through engagement posts twice per month, which are designed to encourage the audience to comment or share the posts. We experiment with different concepts and topics for these posts each month and have seen continued success.
Florida Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goal is to drive engagement and reach across all posts to increase awareness of the Florida Lottery and ultimately drive players to purchase. We track our performance monthly and set yearly goals, which we monitor each month to ensure our strategies are effective. From a secondary goal standpoint, we monitor and measure fan and follower growth. In general, we see healthy engagement with our content. With our campaign activations, we typically see higher engagements and more reach overall due to the paid media support. In FY25 we’ve seen an average of 80k engagements across both Facebook and Instagram combined.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We’ve done both user-generated content as well as tapped social media influencers (micro/macro) to highlight new tickets as well as noting the Lottery's contributions to education. In our user-generated content, we’ve created campaigns highlighting former Bright Future recipients or featuring Florida Lottery players. In turn, this illustrates the impact that Florida Lottery players have on education throughout the state, as consumers have the opportunity to see and hear firsthand how their role in playing our games has led to students going to college. Content across platforms ranges in messaging specific to education, play responsibly, how to play and game awareness.
On the Horizon
In support of the upcoming Week For Life campaign launch in July, our team is excited to launch a social activation focused on the scratch-off family of tickets. We will build a web-based whack-a-mole-style game for our players to experience digitally on their mobile phone or desktop. The game will take place in a colorful environment within the Department of Good Fun office and will ultimately tie back to the TV spot. We take great care to find ways to extend our more traditional advertising into social. So, for every TV spot we produce, we capture extra content on set with our TV talent that can be used to expand the story in social and continue to drive that engagement. You’ll see this for Week For Life, launching in July.
ADVERTISEMENT
Georgia Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals are to drive engagement, promote games, and support brand awareness. Success is measured through reach, engagement rates, and traffic to our website. We’ve had a few high-performing posts, especially around big jackpots and winner posts.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We only use influencers on occasion, not regularly.
On the Horizon
We’re exploring more short-form video and interactive content to boost engagement, as well as testing new ad formats.
Hoosier Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary social media goals are to engage with players, grow our audience, entertain through fun and relevant content, and educate about how to play our games in a responsible way. We measure success through engagement rates, follower growth, reach, and video views. Posts that highlight winners, use trending audio, or tap into local culture often perform especially well, with several exceeding engagement benchmarks.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We often partner with well-known individuals and organizations, who use their influence to reach a broader audience. For example, in May we partnered with IndyCar driver Conor Daly, using long- and short-form content on both Hoosier Lottery Facebook and Instagram pages and Daly’s own social channels. He helped us tap into the excitement of the Indianapolis 500 to drive engagement and statewide awareness.
For our Team USA scratch-off and Fast Play games last summer, we partnered with Hoosier Olympians as well as other influential Hoosiers to create social content. For the 2023 launch of Cash POP, we partnered with IndyCar driver Tony Kanaan and local artist Koda Witsken. And we regularly partner with a handful of influencers to promote gift giving with holiday scratch-offs. We created custom branded gift boxes and prizes (record, blanket, candle, beanie, socks, holiday scratch-offs and more) that aligned with our campaign theme. We gave each influencer a box for themselves and one to giveaway to one of their followers.
On the Horizon
One exciting shift we’re making is moving from one-off influencer campaigns to a year-long “ambassador” approach. Rather than partnering with influencers for single posts or short-term promotions, we’re building longer-term relationships with a select group of content creators who genuinely align with our brand and audience. This allows for more authentic storytelling, deeper engagement, and consistent visibility across platforms. Ambassadors can help us highlight new games, seasonal campaigns, sponsorships, events, and responsible gaming messages in a more natural and relatable way while giving their audiences a chance to connect with the Hoosier Lottery throughout the year.
Idaho Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals with social media are to drive engagement, support game sales, and boost participation in our VIP program. We measure success through key performance indicators like impressions, reach, and interaction rates. While we haven’t had any content go viral recently, our current Cash Cooler promotion has outperformed previous campaigns in both impressions and engagement, exceeding our projected KPIs.
On the Horizon
We’re looking to upgrade our livestream production quality, explore partnerships with influencers, and bring back an automated chatbot via Manychat to enhance engagement and support during campaigns – ideally in time for Raffle 2025.
ADVERTISEMENT
Illinois Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Engagements and engagement rates have been our key focus on legacy social platforms. Our goal is to delight and entertain followers by showcasing the Illinois Lottery and our products in a fun and memorable way. Because we are still new on TikTok, our current priority is to establish our brand on that platform and increase awareness of our account. As a result, our KPIs are centered around awareness metrics: plays and follower growth. We haven’t had any viral posts (yet!), but our posts celebrating winners consistently generate engagement rates between 5% and 9%.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We have not used influencers yet, but they are on the table for our FY26 media plan.
On the Horizon
We are excited to have been one of the first U.S. lotteries to start a TikTok account this year (shameless plug, follow us at @ILLottery). By venturing into this new territory, we hope to reach new prospective players with videos tailored to the platform that highlight our products and brand in a fresh way.
Iowa Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our goals on social media vary depending upon the content and team involved. For the Iowa Lottery’s paid social media content, awareness of the products involved and the reach of the paid posts are important goals and measurement. For our organic social media content, we measure views and impressions, with an emphasis on the sharing of posts and the conversations that visitors have with each other in the comments section within our posts.
We have worked hard within the past year to really dig into the numbers and do our best to understand the reaction of social media algorithms to our content. Within the Meta world, well-performing posts appear to give a lift to all of the content on our pages for a short period of time. We’ve come to refer to it as riding the algorithm wave. It appears that the extra “oomph” from the algorithm following a well-performing post lasts for about a week, and then our overall numbers will decrease again if we don’t have another strong-performing post to keep the wave going.
One particular post from early this year stands out, as it started a wave. In January, a central Iowa man won a $150,000 prize from one of our holiday scratch games. When he made the claim, he mentioned that he was going to use part of his winnings to buy a new truck because his current SUV had 849,000 miles on it. Since he drove that vehicle to make the claim, we went outside and took some pictures of him with his SUV. The post went viral, first with people loving the pictures of him with his SUV, and then with classic-car enthusiasts finding the post and arguing amongst themselves about whether a vehicle could actually reach that mileage. The post has now had more than 785,000 views, nearly 4,400 reactions, and has been shared 218 times. All completely organic. It shows the power of a great real-world story accompanied by compelling images!
Influencers and User-Generated Content
On the paid side of our social media content, we have partnered with influencers who were part of our promotions, including professional ball players and racecar drivers. They have appeared at Iowa Lottery events, done meet-and-greets with lottery players, and recorded celebrity video and audio messages that were delivered to our players. The intrigue and fun of it has added to players’ experience at the events. On the organic side of our social media content, we have not utilized influencers, as we have wanted to maintain an authentic tone in that work.
On the Horizon
During the past year, we have made a purposeful change in approach to our organic social media content. The result has been images and posts that are less formal and polished. Our images especially have a purposefully homemade feel, with graphics that are imperfect and by design, eye-catching. We also have featured more Iowa Lottery employees in our organic content, presenting a real, human face for the Lottery. The goal has been to humanize the place where we work and inject more fun. And it has worked! Facebook remains the Iowa Lottery’s social media platform with the largest audience, and our number of followers there has increased 7% year to date. Our organic page impressions are up 381% from the 2024 average, and the organic impressions from our posts are up 307% from the 2024 average.
Kansas Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our goal on social media is to be a source of information and entertainment for our audience. There really is no A-to-B line for gauging success on social media, so we try to work with our Marketing Department to stay in-message with our traditional advertising. We did have a couple of crafting videos get more traction than expected, especially an instant ticket Christmas wreath we made.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We did try to use influencers, mostly around the Kansas City and Wichita areas. We really didn’t see the kind of engagements and returns that we were hoping for at the time, so at this moment we do not have any user generated content.
On the Horizon
We are about to start our new “Kansas Lottery Show” which will be featured on our social pages. It will be a 15-minute weekly newscast with interviews and information about upcoming promotions.
ADVERTISEMENT
Kentucky Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our organic social content is public-facing and player-focused, designed to achieve three key tones: Fun (highlighting the entertainment value of our games), Informative (providing product insights and resources), and Celebratory (recognizing winners and encouraging others to share in our excitement). We measure success by tracking reach/impressions per month, alongside meaningful engagement metrics like shares. Our high-performing posts include several that surpassed 1M impressions in previous fiscal years. More recently, a holiday-themed party game creative on Facebook Reel reached over 640,000 views.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We incorporate both UGC and influencer marketing into our strategy. This fiscal year, we ran several influencer campaigns, including a recent activation featuring our Kentucky Bourbon Trail games.
On the Horizon
We are always exploring new opportunities to innovate across our social platforms. We are working to highlight not only the higher prize amount winners ($50,000 and above) through winner awareness, but now also to show lower-tier prize winners and focusing on certain products rather than the prize amount. This allows us to showcase the winner experience at every level and highlight the play experience of different products across all three of our channels. Our Communications Department works with our Marketing Department to provide this type of content so that we can showcase it on our social platforms.
Loto-Québec
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
We measure success with reach, engagement rates, follower growth and minutes watched. Winners and promotions are the highest-performing content.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We use lifestyle and popular influencers to promote various products with a potential to reach younger adult crowds. Draw games are not a good match for influencers, but we work with influencers for some scratch tickets with a very specific topic, such as Carte embarquement (Boarding Card) or “Café latte.”
On the Horizon
We will be launching a TikTok account.
ADVERTISEMENT
Louisiana Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Facebook is by far our most engaging platform. We report metrics quarterly as part of our MarComm Dashboard. We like to see overall follower growth, but engagement is the “prize.” Social media algorithms use engagement performance to determine what content to organically display to users, so the better you are able to engage with your content, the more likely it is to be shown to your audience without having to pay for it.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
Our promotions frequently involve user-generated content. For example, to promote our $50,000 Lucky Dog scratch-off, we invited players to upload a photo of and describe their own “lucky dog” for a chance to win a prize pack. Winners’ photos were shared on our social media pages, and the content resulted in a whopping 22.6% average engagement rate.
We used an influencer campaign for our holiday campaign and our Mardi Gras scratch-off campaign this year. On Instagram, two Louisiana lifestyle influencers, Kortlynn Jenae and Marlo Rodrigue Veillon, created custom content about the Lottery’s holiday game offerings and using scratch-offs for gift-giving during the holidays. The influencer campaign resulted in over 947,813 impressions on Instagram and Facebook. The Lottery also collaborated with Ron Orleans and Karen Phan, both from New Orleans, who post about Louisiana lifestyle, culture, food and events. Their stories highlighted the fun of Mardi Gras lottery tickets in celebrating the carnival season.
Maryland Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
We aim to increase awareness of and engagement with Maryland Lottery products and promotions. We display the Lottery in a fun, positive light in an effort to attract new players and keep current players engaged. We measure this through the number of people we reach with each post and by looking at the engagement rate. Either the reach or engagement rate will be more important or relevant, depending on the goal of a specific post (either awareness or engagement). Our highest-performing posts in terms of reach and engagement are consistently our winners posts. Even a photo of an anonymous winner will garner hundreds of likes and comments, the majority of which are positive.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We encourage players to share their Lottery wins and will repost their photos or videos with their consent. Our players love to cheer on other players’ wins, so winner content always gets a lot of attention. We have also conducted scratch-off giveaway contests where we ask players to post a photo of something specific (example: how they incorporate our holiday scratch-offs into their holiday decorations), include a hashtag in their post caption and tag us, so we are able to track entries. This extends our reach past our own followers and targeted groups (through paid campaigns), because our fans are posting content on their personal pages, so their followers will see it and maybe engage with us as a result.
On the Horizon
We’re excited about producing social content that not only markets our products but fits in the current social landscape. This may mean jumping on a trend or using humor to covey our message. We are finding creative ways to stay in the conversation on social while maintaining a level of restraint due to being a state agency.
Massachusetts Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
The Mass Lottery’s goal for social media is to provide open communication, in both informative and entertaining ways, to our players and potential players. We measure our success based on social analytics such as impressions, engagement and reach. Our top performing context centers on our winner stories, highlighting those who win top prizes in our games and their real-life story of how they came to win their prize and what they plan to do with their winnings.
On the Horizon
We are in the process of hiring a visual media specialist with the goal of this position assisting in creating more timely, local content focused on our winners, retailers and products.
Michigan Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our main goal is to create awareness of Lottery overall and get engagement from our audience. Anytime we have a winner story that is quirky (e.g. a winner who buried his ticket in a Mason jar in his backyard) we see great engagement. Trying to pull an interesting fact from the content we are creating, and incorporate it into our posts, has been a successful strategy for us.
Minnesota Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goal with social media is engagement. As a key component of our multi-channel strategy, it’s where our brand comes to life – our voice, our personality and our opportunity to build genuine relationships with our players. Success is measured not just in audience growth, but in increasing engagement year over year across all channels. Our highest-performing posts are our winner announcements and some of our livestreams, like when we have played a game with viewers for their chance to win a trip to New York City for Powerball First Millionaire of the Year.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We created a monthly Share Your Lottery Story contest to gather user-generated content. Players can share their stories on our website, and we compile and use them when appropriate (holidays, big jackpots, etc.). We also use influencers in our campaigns, such as beneficiary, summer tickets, Vikings, etc. We want them to be uniquely Minnesotan, just like us. For example, influencers who authentically love being outdoors to showcase how lottery dollars benefit Minnesota’s environment, or with Vikings fans who enthusiastically showcase our Vikings scratch game.
On the Horizon
We’re really excited about our upcoming Back to the Future campaign. We have a lot of fun content planned and think the players will love the nostalgia. They can engage in fun trivia, enjoy our commercial and other videos, and influencer content. It’s going to be a blast!
Mississippi Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
While our primary goal remains a consistent increase in followers and engagement, it is also a goal of the C,ommunications team to provide engaging content. As with most lotteries, winner awareness content performs extremely really well for us, but we have really put a lot of time and effort into creating “trend videos” to reach the 40-and-under demographic – hence the addition of a TikTok account. We also heavily utilize our Facebook account and do weekly Live broadcasts with the latest lottery news. At the end of each month, we conduct the Lives on the road and feature different retailers across the state. We know different generations use different social media platforms, so we tailor the content to the audience.
On the Horizon
We’re excited about our foray into TikTok and if we will see that demographic engage.
Missouri Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
We track engagement, reach and impression metrics weekly. When we launched Instagram last November, we held a ticket giveaway on the platform to encourage followers. An organic video post about a $1 million Mega Millions ticket set to expire (geo-targeted to just the southwest portion of the state) did much better than we had anticipated on all platforms – with 74K views, 368 reactions, and 258 shares on Facebook alone.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We have asked players to submit photos representing the Lottery’s transfer to education. Those photos then counted as entries for a giveaway.
On the Horizon
As Instagram is still new for us, we’re really looking forward to delving more into trending themes and content.
Montana Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals for social media across both the Montana Lottery and Sports Bet Montana accounts are to expand our following, boost engagement, and strategically cross-promote to connect Sports Bet Montana accounts with Montana Lottery main accounts. We measure success by tracking monthly analytics, noting increases or decreases in these key areas, and specifically by monitoring the cross-platform engagement driven by our promotional efforts.
Our most unexpectedly high-performing post for our lottery accounts was a video addressing negative comments, emails and messages about our popular raffle game, Montana Millionaire. Complaints were centered around a few key areas, primarily the limited number of tickets and the quick sellouts. This video garnered a significant number of views and a high level of engagement. We had no idea it was going to be taken so well – we found that transparency and a bit of humor can go a long way in connecting with our audience! Read more about this video, which was done in Jimmy Kimmel’s “Mean Tweets” video style.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
For Sports Bet Montana, we utilize influencers for advertising purposes, though we don’t manage those relationships directly through our social media channels. For our Montana Lottery social media accounts, we do incorporate user-generated content when it’s provided to us; however, most of our content is developed in-house or through our advertising agency. Some of the UGC we have featured includes winner photos at prize claims, if we have their permission; photos of our sales agents, including those recognized as “Sales Agent of the Year;” and unique customer moments. It’s rare but we have received and shared unique submissions, like a selfie from the very first customer to purchase a 2024 Montana Millionaire ticket.
On the Horizon
This summer, we’re launching a new Montana Lottery loyalty program, and we can’t wait to weave it into our social media presence. We’ll be looking for creative ways to highlight the benefits and rewards of the program, making it easy and exciting for our players to engage and earn. Another exciting project involves bringing more of our Montana Lottery employees into our social media reels. Our players genuinely enjoy seeing the faces behind the games and seem to appreciate getting to know the people who make it all happen. It helps build a stronger connection and adds a personal touch that resonates well with our audience. We’re looking forward to showcasing their personalities and the passion they have for what they do!
For our Sports Bet Montana social media accounts, in the coming months we may be giving away tickets to a sporting event. We’re excited about the potential for increased reach and engagement.
Nebraska Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals for social media are to build a community with Nebraska Lottery players and share how lottery proceeds build a better Nebraska. We don’t have specific measurements for success, but our social audiences have grown over time and many players use our social channels as their first choice for interacting with us. And sometimes we’ve been able to provide a space for players to step into the spotlight. In April 2023, Torry Nielsen of Lincoln turned in a $10 winning Wild Cherry Crossword Doubler Scratch ticket at our offices and asked if he could have a big check. His photo went viral due to an uncanny resemblance to the character Ricky from the Trailer Park Boys television show. The organic Facebook post has 81,468 impressions, 441 reactions, 283 shares, and 61 comments, and sparked national media attention. People are still commenting on the original Facebook post.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
Influencer marketing is a topic that we keep discussing internally. We’ve been approached by some online personalities in the outdoor sports category that may be a good fit for promoting environmental projects that are funded with lottery proceeds.
New Mexico Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goal is to reach adults who may have an interest in Lottery games or benefits. We want to connect with current players to tell them about promotions, new games and get their feedback with surveys. We want to connect with new people by getting their attention through a share, a tag, or a comment from one of their friends. We also want to use social media to connect with retail partners. Sharing retailer content and encouraging them to share ours is our way of staying connected without a lot of work.
We use Meta Business Suite Insights to measure success. The communications manager frequently checks the statistics and compares them to our content to help decide how future posts or campaigns should be structured. Keeping an eye on these numbers has proven beneficial when it exposes an unexpected trend. For example, the topic of responsible gaming was outperforming regular contest content. We have a social media contest every Friday, and once per month, the contest will feature responsible gaming. They are very similar to all the other contests regarding the prize and time frame. However, these contests have yielded an average of 31% more comments than regular contests, such as Name the Game or This or That.
On the Horizon
We recently conducted a player survey on social media and were surprised by how many respondents indicated that they didn’t know the New Mexico Lottery had social media or that they had never thought to follow us. This inspired our Marketing Department to focus advertising on social media for the first time, including radio liners and in-store point of sale. We are excited to see if these efforts help expand our followers by getting the word out about our social media presence.
New York Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals are to grow/diversify the New York Lottery player base while nurturing our core; to drive positive associations with the New York Lottery; and to facilitate a two-way value exchange between the New York Lottery and New Yorkers. Metrics include but are not limited to: growth rate (followers), average reach, effectiveness rate, sentiment, entertainment score, average view duration/average percentage watched, and more. High-performing posts include content where we celebrate New York’s diverse communities and content highlighting lottery winners and the feeling of winning.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
Some of our recent successes with influencers include games such as Year of the Snake and our Bonus (Multiplier) series; we also partner with influencers to celebrate themes such as the New York State Fair and Black History Month.
On the Horizon
We consistently explore new and innovative ideas on how to use social media to best inform New York Lottery players. When we develop a breadth of unique social-first concepts, it helps drive our performance in both organic (earned) and paid contexts. We create content that tells the story of the New York Lottery, which we want to be a positive experience on New Yorkers’ social feeds. One example: We are currently developing content that taps into how New Yorkers react to instant game wins.
North Dakota Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
In one word: Awareness. We do a lot of organic social posts, winner awareness (we let followers know a big win happened in North Dakota, then what city, then who claimed it!), retail/Pick & Click promotion awareness and the like. Due to lack of time to dedicate to social media, it is more of an awareness platform for us.
Ohio Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our goal is to inform our players about games, promotions and our mission through entertaining posts, videos and gamified posts that keep players engaged. Our social channels have given players a direct line to us whether they’re commenting or sending direct messages. Recently, we had an unexpected high-performing post on X, which is our lowest-performing platform for engagement and growth. We do not often see numbers outside of what is normally shown in our metrics reporting. In this case, we posted a photo of a winner holding a big check showing the amount they won. In the post, we mentioned that Sheetz sold the ticket. The official Sheetz X account (with over 500K followers), replied to the post and quote tweeted it on their own page. This exponentially increased the reach, click rate and engagement on the post. Since we often post winner photos, it was unexpected to see such a spike in numbers. It was great to interact with a retailer and have fun with a big brand on a channel where we normally don’t see a lot of activity.
On the Horizon
We recently met with our social media management platform team to explore their social listening tool. This led to us building new, thorough queries that are now regularly used. Engaging with social listening on a deeper level will help us to better understand our current audience and our potential audience. These reports can help us create proactive messaging and more relevant content for our channels.
Oklahoma Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Social media continues to be our fastest, most direct line of communication with players, so it’s a top priority for us. Our main goals are to grow awareness, build community, and ultimately drive engagement that supports sales. We look at metrics like follower growth, reach, engagement rates, and click-throughs to see what’s resonating and where we can improve. While we haven’t had anything go “viral” in the traditional sense, we’ve definitely had posts that significantly outperformed our usual benchmarks. More often than not, those wins come when we’ve leaned into humor or hopped on a trending moment in a way that feels authentic and fun for our audience. When we can make someone laugh and remind them to grab a ticket on the way home, that’s a win in our book.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We’ve leaned into influencer marketing quite a bit over the past year, and it’s been a game-changer for us. We’ve partnered with local influencers to help promote new Scratchers, spotlight our app and Players Club, give away free tickets, and boost visibility around major promotions. These partnerships have played a big role in growing our following and generating strong engagement. Influencers bring a level of authenticity and excitement that really resonates with their audiences, and in turn, helps introduce us to new players in a way that feels organic and fun. Currently we have a campaign highlighting different things to do in Oklahoma while promoting our Scratcher “State of Play.” We have used these influencers to go on road trips or try different adventures. They have been very popular.
On the Horizon
We’re about to try a new approach with influencer content that we’re really excited about. This fall, we’re launching a commercial featuring one of the biggest local influencers – not just promoting the campaign, but actually making a cameo in the spot. Because she’s so recognizable, it adds instant familiarity and buzz. What makes this different for us is the level of collaboration. Instead of the typical model where we give influencers general guidelines and let them run with it, we’re taking a more hands-on, co-created approach – almost like a spokesperson or celebrity endorsement. She’ll be capturing behind-the-scenes content during the shoot to help tease the campaign, and she’ll also lead a promotion tied to the featured Scratcher once it’s live. We’re working closely with her to keep the content true to her style, but we’re also pushing for a more polished, high-energy execution that we think will really pop. She’s excited about this direction too, and if it performs well, we see it becoming a blueprint for how we work with influencers going forward.
Ontario Lottery and Gaming
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goals are engagement with our brand and messages to keep OLG and our products top of mind. Our goal isn’t to go viral; however, some of our collaborations have done really well – such as when we collaborated with Loud Luxury to remix our Wintone. When they posted it on TikTok it went viral.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
OLG’s influencer strategy is really dependent on the campaign but is truly grounded in reaching and engaging with our under-35 audience outside of traditional advertising. We work with influencers in an authentic way that is able to engage their audience in a way that resonates with them. This creates “stickiness” for OLG as a brand and keeps us top of mind, while also engaging and entertaining influencer followers. We also put paid media behind the influencers we work with so that the content reaches beyond their followers to a targeted Ontario audience.
On the Horizon
We are procuring a social media agency this year to work with us to create social-first and creator content regularly to engage consumers in unique ways outside of our regular marketing.
Oregon Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our goal is to meet our customers and communities where they spend their digital time and attention in a manner that is relevant, topical and seasonally appropriate to Oregonians. While “viral” is a subjective term, we have had many posts that have reached millions of Oregonians and beyond over the past decade. Typically, those posts lean into unique and interesting topics, local historical factoids, “lightning in a bottle” moments, or happy celebrations with little to no “virality” coming in the form of following trends or fads. Since our products and our funding all occur within the boundaries of our beautiful state, the lion’s share of what we create and share comes from a foundation of Oregonian relevance.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
Recently, as a feature of a brand campaign that highlights the Oregon Lottery’s connection to Oregon’s state parks, we worked with an outdoorsman with a strong Instagram follower base. In just two posts, our own Oregonian follower base grew by more than 4,000 new Instagrammers. That said, it only takes one incident to lose hard-earned trust, integrity and positive perception, so we have been very careful in our exploration of the influencer and user-generated space. We tested some paid influencers from the sports sphere when we launched sports betting in Oregon, and have tested some limited engagements with smaller micro-influencers (mostly on Instagram). In evaluating most of the larger, firm-represented influencers, their audiences generally only touch on a small percentage of Oregonians, and we haven’t been able to find a way to make the spend meet the desired results.
On the Horizon
We are always keeping an eye on the social media space, and it is a regular, significant part of our advertising strategy. With an in-house design and development team, we work diligently to keep up with new trends and offerings in the space. That makes most of our new advancements incremental and part of a larger dedication to continuous improvement. We’re excited about everything we create, but don’t have any new techniques or major shifts for this year.
Pennsylvania Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
We measure success by growing and retaining followers and increasing engagement rates. Our advertising agency provides a monthly report which shows us which posts had the highest engagement. Our “Question Series” posts have garnered engagement rates that are above industry averages. Our Instagram sports ticket giveaways have been a successful way to grow our followers, with each giveaway gaining us 800 to 1,000 followers. We boost the giveaway posts to increase their reach.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
For several years now, we have used social media influencers during the holiday season, and we’ve just recently added a few influencers that post year-round regarding jackpots, scratch-offs and other promotional ideas.
On the Horizon
From a paid perspective, we’re using more lo-fi content, which is helping us reach a younger audience.
Puerto Rico (Lotería Electrónica)
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our key goals are educating users on how to play, providing guidance on fraud prevention, sharing drawing results and prize information, engaging followers through interactive content, and strengthening brand loyalty with our audience. While we haven’t had a single massively viral post, drawing-related content consistently performs above average. Interactive posts tend to generate strong engagement.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We have collaborated with influencers. A recent campaign featured a local comedy influencer promoting instant games. The video showed a humorous reaction from a wife after discovering her husband had scratched the instant ticket, when she had specifically told him not to.
On the Horizon
We’re currently rolling out AI-driven tools and chatbots to automate responses to frequently asked questions, aiming to improve the user experience and ensure 24/7 engagement. This initiative is part of our broader effort to modernize customer interaction and streamline our communication processes across social platforms.
Rhode Island Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Whether through Reels or giveaways, we focus on strategic collaborations that align with our product and resonate with our audience. These help drive awareness, engagement and sales, while also building credibility in the local community. For winner awareness, we highlight real Rhode Island winners to generate excitement and reinforce that people do win. For promotion and campaign visibility, social acts as an extension of our advertising strategy, helping to drive interest and participation in current games and offers. For brand awareness, we want to consistently show that Rhode Island Lottery is fun, exciting, and rewarding. We also use social advertising to reach segmented audiences (based on interests, behavior, or partner email lists) with specific goals like encouraging new or Lite users to register or upgrade to play online, promoting 2nd Chance entries, and offering iLottery Bonus Money as an incentive to upgrade/play online.
We measure success through post performance (reach, engagements, shares), website traffic driven from social, growth in player registration and upgrades, and ad performance by audience segment and CTA. Our Facebook Lives consistently generate great engagement.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We regularly work with influencers and leverage local and national partnerships through collaborated content and giveaways. These efforts consistently generate some of our highest-performing posts across platforms, helping us break out of the traditional lottery follower bubble and reach new, relevant audiences. We focus on influencer partnerships that make sense for our brand – whether it’s lifestyle influencers with strong local followings or niche personalities who align with specific campaigns. These collaborations help us reach new audiences, boost credibility and drive engagement and campaign participation. For example, on Instagram, we’ve done collaborated Reels and giveaways with influencers that resulted in significant increases in reach, shares, and new followers. On Facebook, we’ve mirrored these efforts with influencer-led posts, “comment to win” contests, and co-branded promotional pushes.
On the Horizon
One of our priorities is to expand our Facebook advertising strategy using segmented audience lists. We’re discussing testing more targeted campaigns designed to encourage users to join or upgrade their VIP accounts. We’re also looking forward to collaborating again with Ian Brownhill, an influencer we’ve worked with in the past. Since our last collaboration, his following and engagement have grown significantly, and we’re excited to build on that momentum with fresh, creative content.
South Dakota Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our winner posts are generally the ones that go viral. When we have a jackpot winner for our in-state draw game, Dakota Cash, we post the night of the draw where the winning ticket was purchased. These are our strongest-preforming posts. We track total reach and engagement with our social media posts, but we also understand that different content won’t reach the same benchmarks.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
We’ve dipped our toes in the water recently with this, particularly with instant tickets. We’ve used influencer-styled videos to create reels and YouTube Shorts that showcase our tickets in a creative way.
On the Horizon
We want to continue down the path of using Reels and Shorts to market our products.
Tennessee Education Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Driving ticket sales remains a key marketing objective, but the primary purpose of our social media presence revolves around building awareness and cultivating an engaged fan base. The aim is to keep users coming back to the channels to raise awareness about the Tennessee Education Lottery through entertaining and informative content. The four main objectives used as measurements for success are increase brand awareness (measured through impressions); support ticket purchase intent (measured through engagements, shares/saves); build and nurture a community of engaged fans (measured through net follower growth and engagement rate); and establish profiles as a destination (also measured through net follower growth and engagement rate).
Texas Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
At the Texas Lottery, our social media strategy centers around three key goals: educating our audience, keeping them informed and entertained, while also encouraging responsible play and driving ticket sales. Education is at the heart of our purpose for social media. We consistently share content that teaches consumers how to play our games and highlights how the Texas Lottery supports public education and Texas veterans. We also prioritize player protection with responsible gambling messaging year-round, with a special emphasis during NCPG’s Gift Responsibly and Problem Gambling Awareness Month campaigns. We use social media to keep our players informed about the latest lottery news and game updates. Some of our most engaging content includes jackpot updates, which often spark excitement and conversation among followers. We creatively tie these posts to seasonal themes and national observances, like “National Donut Day,” to add a fun, relatable twist. We also spotlight our newest scratch ticket games, which are released monthly, ensuring players are always in the loop about fresh opportunities to play.
Social media offers a unique space to connect with our audience in a lighthearted, engaging way, entertaining along with driving sales. Through collaboration between our Media Relations division and our internal advertising team (who collectively work with our advertising agency, Third Ear), we produce original content that captures attention and reflects the personality of the Texas Lottery brand. One of our most consistently popular content types includes press articles about recent winners. We share these stories on our platforms, where they generate significant engagement. Followers tag friends, comment and share widely, boosting both reach and excitement around playing.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
Over the past few years, we’ve launched several successful contests that encouraged user-generated content and deepened engagement with our social media audience. One standout example was a Facebook giveaway tied to our Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans scratch ticket games. We invited followers to submit photos showing why they were the biggest fan of their respective team. The response was overwhelming, with hundreds of enthusiastic submissions. The two photos with the most likes each won a prize pack of Cowboys or Texans scratch tickets. The contests achieved great reach and engagement from our Facebook audiences: Dallas Cowboys: 427k reach, 300 comments, 379 shares; Houston Texans: 365.5k reach, 48 comments, 272 shares.
In addition to contests, we’ve had our first influencer help promote one of our newest scratch ticket games. In April 2025, we partnered with Chet Garner, host of The Daytripper, a popular Texas-based travel show, to promote our $3 Million Ca$h scratcaregame and its exciting second-chance prize – the European Skycruise. Chet documented his scouting trip for the Skycruise through immersive video content filmed in Paris, Lisbon and Rome, offering players a firsthand look at what they could experience if they won. His content resonated widely, reaching over 5.2 million followers across social media platforms and bringing heightened visibility to both the game and the promotion.
On the Horizon
We’re excited about our “Jaws On The Water” movie trivia contest occurring this summer on our Facebook page. We’re working with Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Texas to host four outdoor screenings at the Volente Beach Resort, in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Jaws film release, and our JAWS scratch ticket game which released June 2. Twenty lucky Facebook followers will win a four-pack of admission tickets if they can answer Jaws-related movie trivia questions correctly.
Virginia Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our social media channels are a way to connect directly with our most loyal players, informing them about new products, reminding them about our mission and that 100% of our proceeds go to K-12 public education in Virginia, and sharing our responsible gaming messaging. These platforms are a tool to build trust, address customer complaints, and encourage brand loyalty. We do measure follower growth, but with yearly changes to the business practices of all of the different platforms, it’s no longer as easy to grow each channel while competing with user decline on the overall platform. For example, our X follower growth has been stagnant for several years. Instagram and YouTube continue to grow, but Facebook has slowed down as less people actively create new accounts on that platform. Unique winner stories continue to rule, consistently resulting in the highest-performing content.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
To date, our work with social media influencers on Facebook and Instagram is handled through our media buying firm which works with a vendor partner, PopShorts. In a nutshell, PopShorts finds the influencer, then fully vets all their other content and determines if they are a good brand fit for us. Once that recommendation is made to us, our Marketing team has the opportunity to review/confirm the person, then have open back-and-forth communication about the content and also final right of approval/refusal for all associated copy, photos and videos that will be posted.
On the Communications side, we use topic-appropriate influencers for our education messaging and also review recommendations and all content. For the two phases of our annual Thank a Teacher campaign (our art contest and then the core campaign leading up to National Teacher Appreciation Week), we use influencers recommended by PopShorts, and they are usually parents or teachers (sometimes both!) We’ve seen some great success with this. A couple of the influencers we’ve used have proactively asked year after year to participate in our Thank a Teacher campaign! On the other hand, we once stopped a relationship with a mom whose content by the following year wasn’t really in line with our brand. Similarly, we had one we were interested in enough that we asked whether she’d consider either removing or stopping certain types of content on her channels – but she chose not to do so, so we didn’t work with her. During each active campaign period, our media firm along with several of us are actively monitoring to ensure nothing goes off the rails.
On the Horizon
We recently began segmenting how we spend our boosted dollars for posts through Meta and are seeing some great results in terms of regional placement of winner content. We are just in the beginning stages of exploring influencers specifically on YouTube (those who record themselves scratching tickets) and whether we might be able to leverage their followers to our advantage on the product side.
Washington's Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Our primary goal with social media is to increase brand awareness and participation among a younger audience. We measure success in this area by tracking follower growth on platforms where younger demographics are most active, as well as monitoring sentiment and engagement. Being active on social media gives us a direct channel to connect with this audience and build positive brand associations.
We’ve seen strong performance from partnership content, especially through our collaborations with the Seahawks and Mariners that feature recognizable athletes. For example, our recent Mariners collab post featuring Cal Raleigh received 56.6K views and 2K likes. Our Seahawks blooper reel also performed well, earning 79K views and 5K likes. We’ve also tapped into culture trends to generate viral moments; a great example is our version of the “Not My House But I Know My Way Around” trend, which received 916K views and 1.1K likes. Additionally, when winner stories like this post with 18K views and 321 likes go viral, it helps show that young people do win – supporting our goal to build relevance and trust among a younger demographic. Posts that highlight our beneficiary efforts also help increase awareness around where Lottery dollars go, which is another key objective of our social strategy.
West Virginia Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Social media is our most immediate and impactful channel for reaching players. Our goals include promoting new products and promotions, fostering community engagement, and reinforcing brand trust while remaining cost-effective. Success is measured through engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares), reach, and campaign-specific KPIs. Some of our highest-performing posts involve high-value giveaways like concert or sports tickets. However, we’ve also seen unexpectedly strong engagement from more organic content, such as a simple “This ticket vs. that ticket” comment contest or seasonal promotions like a Halloween-themed prize pack.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
While we have not implemented a formal influencer strategy, we have selectively shared user-generated content that aligns with our brand voice and campaign themes. For example, players who tag us with winning ticket selfies or creative lottery-themed posts are occasionally featured, helping us foster a sense of community.
On the Horizon
We’re particularly excited about the upcoming launch of a new licensed game tied to a highly anticipated film release. This campaign is expected to resonate strongly with both loyal and new players. In addition, we’re developing a series of short-form video reels optimized for all platforms to increase visual engagement and reach.
Wisconsin Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
Two of our primary goals with social media are to consistently improve our engagement and add more followers. We’ve improved our engagement by developing new content, adjusting our schedule, and adding media to our X page. Our follower count has also been impacted by creating new and engaging content. In addition, facilitating giveaways twice a month, monitoring content daily, allowing our posts to breathe easier on Facebook, and using stories more frequently on Facebook and Instagram have also helped.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
Influencers are an idea we are considering, but we have not used them.
On the Horizon
The Moola Minute, featuring the Wisconsin Lottery mascots, the Moola sisters. The Moola Minute isn’t new but is continuously worked on. We started it last year, in an effort to improve our social media engagement. The results were immediate. Each week on Thursdays, we post a question as part of our Moola Minute content. The question is always lottery-related – a limited-time offer, new product, jackpot, lottery-history, or upcoming event, to name a few examples. It is not uncommon for the post to generate hundreds of comments, 50 to 80 shares, and lots of fun, back and forth between the lottery and the users. After 24 hours, we randomly select one user and award them a free $2 scratch ticket. This content is very popular and has reached a point where users look for it each week.
Wyoming Lottery
Primary Goals and Measuring Success
In the past we used to track growth of followers, engagement, etc. After a certain point we began to see very little growth or just general dips that didn’t tell the whole story, so we stopped tracking. Also, we do have a small population and understand that we will hit our max on certain audiences and have to keep figuring out new ways to attract the younger demographics. We see the most interest on our winner posts and jackpot alerts, as well as small giveaways.
Influencers and User-Generated Content
The only content we’ve ever shared that was provided to us by players were giveaways in which they had to send in a photo to enter to win. This has varied between them drawing a cowboy for our game Cowboy Draw” or submitting a selfie with tickets they purchased.
On the Horizon
Right now we are testing out AI to help start creative and then pulling it into design programs to finish. This has been a wonderful tool to test out as it allows our in-house team to react quicker to things like growing jackpots and still deliver designed posts that don’t take a lot of time to create. We will also be exploring more video content in our new fiscal year to try to talk about different topics like responsible gambling.
Related Content:
