Social Media Competitions: Don’t give out your own service as the prize
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Chou Note
When you run a social media competition when people submit pictures or videos and one person wins a free prize, DO NOT use your own service as a free price. You want to use something that people already want. Usually these are things like Apple products or cameras. If your service is so valuable that it will incentivize people to submit for a competition, they like your service anyway and for you this “marketing” campaign is redundant – only people who already think you have the best service ever would participate.
Also, don’t give out the prize quietly. Make it the biggest announcement in the world. It’s special.