Those are issues we talk a lot about ourselves as we plan out the lottery’s schedules. We know that not everyone may even like a certain game or contest, and with our busy lives these days, it can be difficult to fit everything in. So, we concentrate on variety in what we offer so you’ll have choices. It’s like Mom always said: Variety is the spice of life!
Our Twitter contests do generally run for just 15 minutes and we often hold them during the business day. We’ve tried longer contests on Twitter and have held them early in the morning and in the evening. The results surprised us: The number of entries actually went down in the Twitter contests we held outside business hours. And, the longer contests made some people complain that they couldn’t find our posts as easily because our information had been pushed well down in their feeds. Twitter is a fast-paced, instantaneous platform, and a 15-minute contest during the day seems to be “just right” for it!
But in the past few months, we have switched up our Facebook contests so they now run for 24 hours. The number of entries we’ve seen in them has skyrocketed, so it seems that people like the change. The Find-The-Symbol contests we hold on our website run at least for several days, and our bigger games and promotions run for weeks or months at a time so everyone has plenty of time to enter. The contests and events we hold at our retailers also are at different times and in different locations, again with the goal of giving people options.
But when it comes to the time limits in our games, promotions and contests, they are there for a reason. If we didn’t tell you the start and end dates, how would you ever know when to enter or buy tickets? I’m pretty sure we’d get complaints if we just said we were having an event at some time in April, but didn’t tell you exactly when.
In the end, it may not be possible to please all of the people all of the time. (But we’ll keep trying!) And we like hearing from you, so keep that feedback coming!
Oh well. It's a fact of life.
You can't really please everyone. Always, someone somewhere will find something to complain about.
Posted by: Mark Haigh | April 25, 2013 at 11:31 PM