Barclaycard US launches social media sweepstake

It'll be interesting to see the results of this campaign.

In our experience, running competitions to attract followers or likes can often be a red herring. Great for noise or awareness but ultimately not great for longterm community building.

Yes, you can attract lots of RTs or likes but very often not from your target audience, and not even from audiences who can ever subsequently be converted to purchase or use your service.

So while the outreach metrics might look great in the short term, longer term having a chunk of followers who once 'liked' your brand on a whim but will never interact with it, skews your engagement data and potentially confuses the strategies chosen to get deeper engagement with genuine customers, or to draw them into a purchase journey.

Barclaycard are not novices by any means, so will have worked hard to get the targeting right and avoid these pitfalls.

Don't know about BarclayCard but from my experience with a couple of similar campaigns from other banks, the LIKE is itself a red herring. Once visitors are drawn to the bank's social media page by the contest, they're enticed to respond to a CTA via a promotional offer e.g. apply for a credit card. By their very nature, these are one-off CTAs. The prize money is so small that such these campaigns deliver very low CPLs. Although it's debatable whether social media should be used in this fashion for lead generation - as against branding and long term community building - such campaigns are not uncommon.