How to slay your giveaway
Thinking about hosting a giveaway on your social media platform? Good idea! A well-planned giveaway can grow your audience and boost your engagement, not to mention reward loyal followers! But the key word is “well-planned.” So, how to plan a giveaway well? Here’s my top tips.
- Keep it simple. Loop giveaways that require entrants to follow 10+ other accounts in order to win are notorious on platforms like Instagram, but for every person that follows you because of your loop giveaway, that’s one person that will unfollow you immediately after the winner is announced. If you do want to collaborate with another account on a giveaway, keep it to one or two MAX and make sure they are in your niche so that any followers you gain will stick around even after the giveaway ends.
- Pick a prize relevant to your ideal customer. Gift cards to your business are a great idea. So is a giveaway of your best-selling service or product. Make your prize enticing to people who actually want to be your customers, and they’re more likely to become ones if and when they don’t win.
- Make it easy to enter. Asking people to follow you (and any other accounts you’re collaborating with), like the post, and tagging a friend or two in the comments is standard practice for giveaway rules. You may want to consider setting a maximum number of entries to avoid one or two people entering hundreds of times, making others think it’s impossible to win and disincentivizing them to enter. Personally, I set a maximum of 10 comments (or entries) with an option for five bonus entries if they share my giveaway in their stories — make sure they tag you so you can see it!
- Consider the timing. In my experience, shorter is better. Many of my giveaways have stopped getting any new entries after a few days, and I’m as impatient to know the winner as anyone. But according to internet research, many people think two weeks is the optimal time to run a giveaway. So, I split the difference and usually run my giveaways for a week. It’s up to you, but no matter what, pick an amount of time that people won’t forget about it entirely (including you!)
- Count those entries! Recently, Eliza let me in on an amazing tool that will analyze your giveaway post, collect up the comments, and pick a winner at random for you. There’s options to add in bonus entries from story shares, include comment replies, and more. It’s a literal lifesaver compared to the time-consuming and tedious Excel spreadsheet method I used before. Check it out here.
So that’s that! Get to giving away (and be sure to let me know when you do, I love a good prize!)