Question: Are there best practices for social media giveaways?
tldr: Yes, there are definitely at least a few best practices to successfully execute a giveaway. It involves proper planning, diligent monitoring, and making sure you had, and met your goals.
You want to giveaway something cool, but you also want to succeed at giving it away. Yes, you can absolutely fail at giving away free stuff. To lessen the chance of that happening, there are a few things you want to before, during, and after the giveaway is over.
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Yep. You still have to plot and plan out a giveaway. Even though its something fun for you, and fun for your audience. As with any marketing, the planning phase is one of the most important phases, with a bulk of the necessary best practices for social media giveaways to succeed.
Hopefully you’ve already learned enough about who you want to target with your giveaway campaign. If not, you should be doing that long before you even attempted to read this quick article.
Can’t give away a gift card to a cigar bar if you produce, and want to attract, non-smokers with an affinity for communing with nature.
Since you got your audience identified, now you can figure out what product or service of yours that will really spark interest.
If you’re really niched down, then your social media giveaway will definitely be a lot easier to execute. If your main dealer is a single product or service, hopefully you’ve built an engaged and rabid audience.
Otherwise, you’ll need to test interest either by tracking sales, or posting images of items you think are good candidates for a giveaway.
If all else fails, giveaway a cell phone or some other new high tech gadget. Be warned though, unless that’s your chosen niche, you’re likely to attract a lot of “one and done” entrants.
Which is a nice segue into the next piece of the planning phase...
Do you want people to follow your one Instagram page? Or do you want people to gain multiple entries by taking specific actions?
One of the major trends for awhile has been to collect emails for your lists, AND shuttle entrants to your other social media profiles and website.
You’re basically killing 10 birds with one stone with a giveaway built like that. Of course there are situations where you’d want to keep the audience small, like if you just want only your most loyal and engaged members to enter the giveaway.
There’s a ton you could and should be doing while your giveaway is going on, but honestly that would take far too long, and may require its own dedicated post.
But, the long and short of it is, you should be engaging with your entrants.
That means still posting your regular content, find new followers in your industry niche, nurturing your current loyal user base through various channels, etc.
Also, y’know, monitor for any cheating.
Your current giveaway is coming to a close. You’re sad. Your users are eager to see if they won.
As stated before, you’ll need to check for any duplicate or suspicious activity (same IP with a ridiculous amount of accumulated points, bot usage, etc.) that could render your planning moot.
Some tools make this easier than others.
Once you’ve weeded out any erroneous entries, and rooted out duplicate entries, its time to pick your winner. Whether it was a chosen at random situation because of a 4 way tie, or whoever got the most referrals, you’ve got to wade through the data you collected.
Once you get through all that fun (I use the term loosely) you get to finally award the winner. Whether it’s a digital or physical prize, do you best to ensure the winner generates some more content for you. It’ll greatly improve the response to your next giveaway or contest when people see that someone “real” actually won.
I could certainly go on longer, but for your sake, I won’t.
Did this article help you in anyway? Drop a comment and let us know. Need help running your viral contest or giveaway with a full featured social media tool that handles your campaign from start to finish? Contact us at TopOut Group today to talk to a sales associate today.
