How to Run a Social Media Giveaway
This method for running a social media giveaway produces the best results, is the fastest to setup & is the cheapest.
We will be using Gleam.io to run our social media giveaway.
Let me explain why you should use a platform to complement your giveaway.
Why use a Competition / Giveaway Platform?
For legal reasons, competitions and giveaways are considered gambling - which in turn has some serious laws & regulations. Using a platform is a good safety method to keep your competition recorded.
You can incentivise people to take action. Gleam rewards your participants with more chance of winning, if they take specific action.
You can capture all sorts of data, from people’s email addresses to phone numbers. Which are extremely important for marketing.
Planning your Social Media Giveaway
Before we start running off & setting up our competition. We need to answer a few questions first.
These will help guide us in the future when we’re setting up.
How will people enter your competition?
What is your goal? (Collect emails, get likes, collect phone numbers etc).
How will you verify the winner?
If you can answer these questions, then your life will be much easier when setting up your social media giveaway.
An example social media giveaway.
Steps to Setup your Social Media Giveaway
These are the practical steps to setup your social media giveaway.
1. Sign up for Gleam
This is super easy & is free initially. You will have to eventually purchase a package, but they are extremely cheap.
We’re talking it’s $10 per month to run a competition - so a 2 month competition only costs $20… It’s insane value - so sign up for Gleam.io.
This is Gleam’s pricing, it’s very good value.
2. Choose your Entry Mechanism
Gleam offers plenty of ways people can enter.
The way it works is, people can enter several times using different mechanisms & this earns them more points, in return they have more entries into the competition.
It’s a really smart system!
These are all the entry mechanisms that Gleam offers!
3. Choose your Prizes
Arguably this is one of the most important things to get right.
Because people won’t enter if there isn’t an adequate prize which captures their interest.
So take your time choosing your prizes, a few good general prize ideas are:
Money
Gift cards
Subscriptions to popular softwares
Holidays
Holidays make great prizes to give away!
4. Launch your Competition
Now you’ve done all the hard work, it’s time to launch your giveaway.
You need a strong launch strategy in order to generate interest & entries in your giveaway.
How to Promote your Social Media Giveaway
We have a few options of how we can promote our social media giveaway.
1. Organic Social Media Posts
The easiest & the cheapest to start with is organic social media posts.
I recommend starting here, because it’s free & easy.
However, if you’re not seeing great results, it might be worth investing money in ads.
Which leads us to number 2…
2. Paid Social Ads
If you’re really struggling for traction, then investing some money in paid social ads can be a great boost.
I’d start experimenting with Facebook & Instagram ads initially & if they don’t work well, maybe try TikTok Ads.
3. Email Marketing
If you have an email list within your organisation, it’s a no brainer to use it!
Send out a big blast newsletter email as part of your launch strategy.
It’s the perfect promotion strategy to get the ball rolling.
Summary of Social Media Giveaway
I really recommend you use a competition platform. I know a lot of you won’t want to spend the money.
But in the long run, I really think the ROI will be much better.
Overall though, I love social media competitions, because they generate interest & capture data.
Which is extremely important.
