How to Run Social Media Giveaways That Go Viral & Achieve Results [+ Examples]

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There are a few better ways to excite your followers than running a giveaway.

People will rush to enter your giveaway, fantasizing about winning the precious gift.

But running a viral and successful social media giveaway goes beyond just enticing your audience with a fancy gift.

After all, many social media users are ready to win your gift without giving anything in return. In fact, some people create social media bots for the sole purpose of winning giveaways.

Am I in any way saying you shouldn’t run giveaways? No, not at all.

However, you need an effective strategy to run giveaways to achieve goals such as increasing engagement and brand awareness, boosting followership, acquiring leads, and more.

Luckily, in this guide, you’ll see how to run viral social contests that achieve campaign goals. Whether you’re running a giveaway for the first or tenth time, you’ll find useful lessons here.

Let’s dive in.

What is a social media giveaway?

A social media giveaway is a marketing campaign that involves the opportunity to win a gift after taking actions such as publishing comments, submitting emails, submitting UGC, taking a quiz, and more.

According to its name, this type of giveaway occurs on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Tiktok, etc. 

While every giveaway involves a winner winning a gift, businesses run giveaways for different reasons. For instance, you can run a giveaway to increase awareness for a new product and run another one the following month to generate social media leads.

Here’s a social media giveaway by Designer Bathware on Instagram:

How can you run a successful social media giveaway? Here are 9 steps to follow for your next social promotion:

Steps to run social media giveaways

1. Set a contest goal before your campaign

If your campaign is just about giving a gift to a lucky winner, then you’re not exploiting the potential of your contests.

When executed correctly, running a contest is one of the most effective marketing strategies for your business. Better still, contests are usually cost-effective.

Through social promotions, you can achieve goals such as:

• Increasing social media followers
• Boosting brand awareness
• Boosting new product awareness
• Increasing engagement
• Driving website traffic
• Collecting user-generated content
• Generating leads

In some cases, you can even achieve two of these goals in a single giveaway campaign. 

But first, you need to set your goal(s) before launching the contest. This will dictate many aspects of your contests.

For example, your goal will determine your entry requirements and the gift you present. 

As you’ve probably heard before, you should set SMART goals. This means your goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Some examples of goals for your contest include:

• Acquire 5,000 new followers during 1 month of the giveaway.
• Drive 3,000 visitors to your website in 3 weeks.
• Acquire 1,000 email subscribers in a month.

Once you set your goal, you can move on to the next step.

2. Use the right gift

Your gift is a critical part of running a giveaway. After all, without a gift, there’s no giveaway.

Therefore, you need to consider some factors before picking one for your giveaway. The first question you need to ask is: will my gift help achieve my giveaway goals?

Again, will it appeal to your ideal audience? A gift like the iPhone can attract thousands of participants. But can those participants buy from your brand in the future?

In most cases, you won’t go wrong by using your product or service as the gift.

Furthermore, you need to consider your budget. How much are you willing to spend on this campaign?

This will determine your gift. Another consideration is the number of winners that will emerge from your contest.

That said, the major gift categories include:

• Products
• Discounts
• Services

For example, Home Scents used its wax melts as gifts in its Halloween giveaway:

In this campaign, the gift is a product by the company. Hence, most participants will be people already interested in their brand products.

3. Pick a giveaway tool to run your campaign

Running a giveaway manually is an option that looks wrong even from the beginning of your campaign. How will you keep track of your participants and manage various aspects of your giveaway?

The reality is that, without a giveaway tool, your campaign can become messy quickly. By using a robust tool, you can design your giveaway, promote it, track statistics, and more.

Some factors to consider before picking a tool for your social media promotion include:

• Your budget
• Giveaway design features
• Ease of use
• Contest management features
• Contest statistics
• Customer support

Considering these factors will help you discover the tool that fits your needs. That said, here are 3 excellent social media giveaway tools available in the market:

Sweepwidget 

This is a tool that’s not only easy to use but also has features that most businesses would need to run successful giveaways. 

Sweepwidget allows you to run giveaways on all the popular social media networks. You can read my full Sweepwidget review for more information.

Easypromos 

With Easypromos, you have access to over 40 contest types. Beyond that, there are hundreds of templates for different campaigns. 

There are also features such as email autoresponders and giveaway editor. You can read our detailed Easypromos review to obtain more information.

Shortstack 

Here’s another excellent contest tool. If you love the ability to customize a campaign to your taste, Shortstack is your best bet. 

Beyond contests, this tool has other lead-generation features, such as landing pages, forms, and email marketing. You can read our full Shortstack review to get more details.

If you want a bigger list of tools, check out our list of the best giveaway tools for Facebook and Instagram.

4. Run giveaways on the right social media platforms

If you have a serious marketing strategy, you probably have buyer personas that define your ideal audience. This persona should include their favorite social media channels.

Apart from that, data from your social media campaigns should uncover your high-performing platforms. 

At times, some industries perform better on some social media platforms than others. For instance, a food business will likely find an ideal audience on Pinterest and Instagram.

So, your analysis will streamline your choices to a few social media channels. This way, you’ll focus on the channels likely to help you reach your goals.

However, choosing social media platforms for your giveaway is just a part of the process. You also have to understand their contest guidelines.

For instance, running an Instagram giveaway requires that you dissociate your giveaway from the platform. Here’s an Instagram giveaway featuring the disclaimer:

Whatever social platform you want to use, you can quickly Google their contest guidelines. This will help ensure your giveaway is not violating the platform’s rules.

5. Specify your giveaway entry requirements and terms and condition

What do participants need to do to have a chance to win your giveaway? You should determine this before creating your giveaway post.

However, your entry requirement should align with your campaign goal.

So, if you want to generate leads, submitting emails will be one of the entry requirements. Common entry requirements for social media giveaways include:

• Following a page
• Commenting on a post
• Tagging a friend
• Sharing a post in your feed
• Sharing a post in a story
• Submitting emails on the giveaway landing page
• Submitting UGC

For some giveaways, participants can execute more than one of those tasks. But this means they’ll receive a particular number of points for each task they perform.

For a giveaway where winners will be selected randomly, more points may increase the chances of winning. Meanwhile, some contests are won by participants who accrue the highest number of points.

While setting your entry requirements, you have to ensure that they align with the value of your gift. To illustrate, few people will record a good video as an entry for a gift worth only $10.

Beyond your entry requirements, you need terms and conditions that guide your giveaways. Some people can call it giveaway rules.

Whatever you call it, these terms guide your contest administration. People who violate these rules may be disqualified even if they win.

An example of what should be in your terms is what will happen if a winner fails to claim their gift after a period. 

If you have a few terms, you can have them in the comments of your giveaway post. But if you run a big organization and have many rules, you can create an external page containing these terms.

Here’s Coffee-Bike’s giveaway on Facebook:

If you click on the link to the terms, you’ll land on another page explaining them in detail. The benefit here is that you can create this single page for giveaways across all social media platforms.

Have issues coming up with the content of your terms? You’ll find templates online to customize for your business.

6. Create your giveaway posts

Now, it’s time to create your giveaway posts. Of course, this will not be a single post. 

After all, you’ll post about your giveaway during its launch and a few times before the deadline. These posts will include the essential details an entrant needs about your contest.

Some common elements of your giveaway post include:

• Image
• Why your audience should enter giveaway
• Entry requirements 
• Duration of giveaway
• Prize to be won
• Number of winners
• Campaign hashtag
• Time to announce winners
• Terms and conditions 

While the most popular location for the giveaway post is the feed, you can also feature this post in your stories, highlights, and other areas of your account.

Doing this will help you reach more potential participants.

A quick tip about your contest images or videos: you should feature the word “giveaway” and the prize in your image.

Since many people will visit your profile, the word giveaway in your image will pull the viewer’s attention. Here’s an example on Instagram on Dice Bags of Holding’s Instagram profile:

There’s no way a visitor to that profile will miss the fact of a giveaway going on. In addition, here’s a giveaway post on YouTube by XLS Tech:

With this post, every participant will have the information they need before entering your giveaway.

7. Promote your contest before and during your campaign

Even though gifts are enticing in themselves, only those aware of your giveaway can take advantage. In addition, getting more participants in your giveaway will increase the chances of achieving your goals.

So, how can you promote your contests?

Ideally, your promotion should start a few weeks or days before the campaign begins. This way, you can build anticipation among your loyal fans.

Then, the promotion will continue during the campaign until the end.

A few ways to promote your contest include:

• Posts on social media pages
• A blog post on your website
• Emails about contests to subscribers
• Use referrals as an entry requirement
• Use tagging friends as an entry requirement 

You’ll discover that some of these promotion tactics involve your audience. This is because your participants have a much wider reach to make your contest go viral.

Check out this email from Binance:

Here, the company used emails to promote its giveaway. More so, they’ve used both email and a giveaway to promote their Twitter Space. A lot of promotion going on.

If you want more information about promotion, read our detailed guide on effective contest promotion tactics to get thousands of participants during your campaign.

8. Contact and announce the winner

Once your campaign starts, the countdown to the end starts. Except your contest involves a leaderboard where other people can see the winner, participants will be in suspense.

For a giveaway where you pick a random winner, every participant has a chance to win.

So, they are hoping to win the gift. In fact, some have even fantasized about how they’ll use the gift.

Unfortunately, only one or a few people will win. Most giveaway tools have winner-picker tools to help select a winner among your participants.

After picking the winners, you have to contact them through email or a DM on social media. Once you interact with them, you can now announce your winners.

Since you specified a date to announce the winners, ensure you stick to this date. To even display more transparency, some brands record videos of them picking the winner.

If it’s a contest, they explain how the winners emerged.

Why are these steps necessary? People don’t want to feel cheated or that you rigged the giveaway to make the winner emerge.

Furthermore, encourage winners to create a post displaying their gift when they get it.

Now, see how the Bank of Baroda announced its contest winners on Twitter:

If participants see transparency in your winner selection and announcement, they will likely participate in future giveaways you run.

9. Analyze your giveaway after the campaign

When we started this guide, we began with a giveaway campaign goal. 

Now, your giveaway is over, and your winners are still reveling in the gift and the fact they won.

But your giveaway campaigns go beyond this. Since it’s a marketing campaign, you need to track your performance.

What better way to do that than tracking numbers that align with your goals?

So, you need to analyze these numbers after your giveaway. Some numbers to track include:

• Number of new followers during the campaign
• Increase in reach during the campaign
• Number of new email subscribers from the giveaway
• Increase in traffic to your website during the period
• The number of times the contest hashtag was used during the campaign

Of course, the numbers you focus on will depend on your goal at the beginning of your campaign. 

In some cases, your giveaway tool will provide the statistics you need. Luckily, since these tools allow you to integrate with Google Analytics, you can obtain even more data.

However, some stats will only be available in your social media management or website analytics tool.

After your analysis, you can determine whether you’ve succeeded (or failed) in achieving your goals. 

More so, you’ll obtain insights to improve your future giveaways.

Conclusion

Like other marketing campaigns, giveaways and contests are effective in achieving your marketing goals. Besides, they can boost your brand image and trust with your audience.

You can use this guide as a checklist when creating your next giveaway.

Are you planning to run a giveaway soon? What’s your plan to make it successful?

Have you run giveaways in the past? What was your experience?

Tell me in the comments!

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