How to run a giveaway contest

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This is more of a checklist for myself.

Know your objectives before running a giveaway contest

You must have objectives to achieve otherwise your giveaway will not generate any results, and it's gonna be a waste of money, time and effort.

After you know your objectives, you must come up with criteria to meet those objectives.

If your objective is to collect email addresses, then you should mention that upfront, and also tell people how their email addresses will be used.

If your objective is to promote some sponsored product using a giveaway, you must be frank to your sponsor about the amount of exposure they can expect based on the statistics and web traffic you have in the past. Tell your sponsor the number of views, comments, engagement they can expect, and where your audience are from.

If your objective is to do a survey, make sure all the questions you want answered are included. And make sure to phrase the questions to get unbiased replies. E.g. Don't ask a directed question such as "Why do you like my content?" but instead ask "What do you like or don't like about about content?".

Determine the contest rules

You must get the contest rules and criteria correct at the start because changing them later will be troublesome and not fair to participants.

Who can join? Age? Location? Can the prizes be mailed to all countries?

What's the end date?

How can people enter? Where do they send their entries?

How will the winners be selected? When and where will they be announced? How will winners be contacted?

Will the contest close early when there are enough participants.

Collect all the information you need

Think carefully about what you need in order to mail things. You'll need name, address, sometimes phone number. Also check if advance if you can actually mail to the country, and how much it is to actually mail to different countries or continent. Shipping can be very expensive.

If your giveaway contest is limited to participants from certain countries, have the participants provide their countries upfront. This will help you filter out participants who are not eligible.

Always ask participants for information so that it is easier to filter the eligible vs non-eligible participants. For example, one really common way is to have participants answer a question where the answer can be easily found in the content created for the giveaway.

You will need the contact information of the winners obviously. But sometimes it may not be that simple to contact winners because the contest could be held on, for example, Instagram and the contestant is someone who doesn't check Instagram messages.

Be aware of giveaway contest rules on the platform you are running your contest

For example Youtube do not allow contests where winners have to pay for their shipping. Youtube also doesn't allow contests that ask people to comment. Do read Youtube's contest guidelines if your giveaway contest is on Youtube.

Finding the winners from the entries

If your criteria is to have people click Like or follow on Facebook, Instagram or some other social media platforms, you must have a way to check if the participants have actually done that. There are websites that provide such tracking services. Gleam is one example. If you know of other contest websites, let me know in the comments section.

If you don't use contest websites to track contestant actions, it's going to be extremely difficult to find the winners who fulfill those action criteria.

Reward your followers

My giveaway contests are usually designed in a way to reward my followers.

In my contests, for example on Youtube, there's usually the criteria that participants must have posted a comment on any of my videos before.

I'm not asking people to post comments because that violates the Youtube contest guidelines. I'm telling people that only participants who have posted a comment in the past are eligible. So even if they post a comment after reading the giveaway criteria, they won't be eligible.

This criteria rewards followers who have been posting comments in the past, and also makes it so that a random person can't just win because he/she happens to chance upon the contest and enter.

And people who post a comment just to enter the contests are probably not true fans/followers and they won't be sticking to see future contests. And if they do stick around, that's great because they are following the Youtube channel.

To check if participants have posted comments on my Youtube channel before, I do a search using their Youtube name in my email account. I get email notifications whenever people comment on Youtube. So those emails are archived in Gmail and can be search easily.

If participants have similar names, ask them to describe their avatar.