How long to run a giveaway

They accomplished this by offering their software, a photographer backpack, and a drone as the prize. Their campaign and prize bundle was able to attract thousands of social media followers and email leads. The majority of their new leads shared a similar interest in photography. This was the target audience that Topaz Labs successfully acquired. The boost in website traffic from their campaign also helped them to land new trial account users. If you offer an iPad, everyone and their dog will enter.

How to decide if you need to team up with another brand. When you are building and marketing your giveaway, keep these main goals in mind. If you plan to use influencers or other people to promote your giveaway, make sure you give them dates, creative and instructions prior to the giveaway launch. Organize PR dates and plans as early as you can. Lock in those plans and set dates so you have deadlines to work towards. PR releases or partnerships are not required at all to run a giveaway it just helps get the word out.

However, multiple prizes as pictured above will help to make your giveaway standout more. For example, placements 1st, 2nd, etc , random winner draw and milestone rewards based on the number of entries collected.

This is extremely useful for decreasing the amount of reading people have to do which leads to as faster conversion rate. We highly suggest you host the video on YouTube or Vimeo then use the embed feature to keep your page load fast. Bonus actions are the most important aspect of your giveaway.

There are so many things you can incentivize. Your giveaway will stand out if you are more creative. Everyone has like my Facebook page or Instagram profile as a bonus action. Try something a little more valuable to your business, check out some of the ideas below. See these examples in action with this monthly draw giveaway. But, how do you actually figure out the best timing for your giveaway?

Are there any major events or holidays coming up that may push down the visibility of your giveaway and leave it forgotten? Your focus should be to get the most engagement from your entrants, which is a hard task if their attention is elsewhere. If you still want to take advantage of the hype around a certain event, it is doable. If you plan on making giveaways an integral part of your business strategy, you can expect great results, especially in terms of higher visibility online, stronger relationships with your audience, and improved engagement rates.

Many organizations and individuals who collaborate with brands choose to run monthly giveaways, which is smart as it creates a habit for your followers.

There is hardly a better way to get more exposure for yourself than word-of-mouth. This will help you get discovered easier and generate the much-needed buzz. As you can see, giveaway timing is everything. As you already know, users have different surfing experiences during weekends and weekdays, but the level of their engagement is also dependable on the hour.

To get the most entries during the weekdays, launch your giveaway either between 9AM and 10AM or between 8PM and midnight. Similar to weekdays, on weekends — you can expect the highest number of entries in the period between 8PM and midnight.

These are usually the peaks of audience activity online that align with the slower tempo people take during relaxation times on weekends. Looking for a shorter answer regarding the timing of your giveaway? Well, Mondays and Tuesdays are typically the best days to launch and promote your giveaway, preferably somewhere in the evening 9PM — 11PM.

Of course, you should think about your target audience and their time zone in order to get the best results. To boost brand awareness and bring in new customers quickly, make sure all the puzzle pieces fit in perfectly. That being said, here are some actionable tips that can help you create a successful social media or blog-related contest. Before you start coming up with a potent strategy, you need to think about the primary focus of your campaign — Is your main goal social media engagement boost?

More followers on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, perhaps? Or maybe you are trying to utilize giveaways for your link building endeavors? The end goal is vital for determining the right strategy and the budget for your contest. But figuring out how long your giveaway should last can be hit and miss. The length of your giveaway largely depends on your goals. Each of these giveaway durations has pros and cons.

Running a giveaway for 1 week or less is a smart choice for encouraging your audience to act quickly. They instill the fear of missing out , which can significantly increase entries. Your giveaway needs to go viral for it to show up in as many news feeds as possible.

Running a giveaway for 2 weeks 14 days is generally the best giveaway running time. Having your giveaway last for 2 weeks is actually the most popular choice for many businesses. It offers the optimum amount of time to reach your ideal audience while keeping your giveaway relevant and timely. When running this type of giveaway, generate tons of hype at the beginning to get an instant burst of entries.

Then keep a steady stream of promotion throughout to keep up the momentum. Right before the end of your contest, create a last-minute promotional frenzy to secure a final boost in entries.

The only downside to a shorter contest like this is that it might not be long enough to raise as much awareness as possible. Although she could have used more text in the image itself, Nicky wisely chose to keep the inclusion of text in the image to the bare minimum, instead using the caption section of the post to let people know how to enter.

Nicky opted to publish a single reminder post on Day Three of the contest. She decided early on that, based on her research, multiple updates per day was way too much, and since her giveaway lasted for seven days, the single mid-week reminder worked well. The captions should reiterate the rules of the giveaway, but it might be worth experimenting with the length of your captions depending on the frequency of your reminder posts. Now all that remains is to pick the lucky winner!

Tallying up the entrants of your Instagram giveaway can be a piece of cake, or it can be a logistical nightmare — it all depends on your entry criteria and the volume of entrants. After her giveaway had concluded, Nicky went through her Instagram feed and entered all the names of entrants who had abided by the rules into a spreadsheet. Individuals who only entered once — by following CATPARTY and tagging two other people — were entered on a single row, while other entrants who tagged more people were entered into multiple rows to reflect the number of entries.

To find the winner of her Instagram giveaway, Nicky used a simple online name-picking tool to select a winner from the list of entrants. Unfortunately, none of the software tools we came across supported CSV upload functionality, meaning that each name had to be entered manually, with entrants who submitted multiple entries being entered the relevant number of times.

If you know of a tool that supports uploads, let me know in the comments! No matter which way you slice it, actually determining the winner of your Instagram giveaway is likely to be at least a little work, so choose a system that allows you to select a winner as efficiently — and fairly — as possible.

Sure, you could just send the winner a direct message, but that would be a missed opportunity. Why not make the announcement of the winner as much of a spectacle as the rest of the contest? You probably already know that you can access analytics data for your Instagram feed if your account is a Business account. Nicky learned all sorts of interesting information after her contest. For instance, she learned that she had a loyal and growing following in London, despite being based on the East Coast of the United States.

This is largely because the enamel pin community is very tight-knit, and is generally pretty trendy in the British capital. Nicky has also made multiple sales to customers in London, which could also help account for this trend.