How to run a successful giveaway

General

As a social media expert, I always get mixed feelings when I see a Giveaway pop up in my feed. Don’t get me wrong, I love being in for a chance to win amazing prizes, to support my favourite small businesses and to discover new ones. So why do I get mixed feelings? Because it’s so easy to make big mistakes when creating your Giveaway.

If you know me, you know I love finding ways to bend social media rules, but when it comes to Giveaways, there’s little room for bending. So let’s have a look at what you can and can’t do!

7 Rules to Remember

You MUST NOT require any form of purchase or cross the line into gambling territory. That means no raffles, no lotteries, no prizes behind paywalls and no purchases required. A giveaway must be completely free to enter!
You MUST include clear rules of entry. This commonly looks like the following: “To enter, follow this page and leave a comment”.
On Facebook, your rules of entry MUST NOT include liking the post, sharing the post or tagging a friend. You can bend this rule by stating that these actions will ‘add another entry’.
You MUST disclose a closing date. In my experience, running a giveaway for a week gives you time to share other posts highlighting the benefits of the prize while keeping it short enough not to lose people’s interest.
You MUST disclose who the giveaway is open to. That means you are allowed to restrict entries to a certain age group or geographic location, and you are allowed to exclude people (ex: people who work for you or people who are already paying you for the service) – but these rules need to be included in your post!

6. You MUST disclose how the winner will the announced. Honestly, this rule is purely to keep your audience safe and including a simple sentence like “The winner will be announced on my Stories” could mean that nobody falls for a scammy link.
7. You MUST state that “This giveaway is in no way sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with [relevant platform].” You can put this right down the bottom; it doesn’t need to be obvious, but it does need to be included.

If you’re unsure if your giveaway is breaking any rules or not, book a 30min Ask-Me-Anything Session so we can double-check together.

Simple breakdowns make all the difference!

Social media is confusing; there are loads of rules to understand, and just when you’re getting the hang of it, everything changes. Staying on top of what is and isn’t allowed can make the difference between thriving and losing all your hard work – but it takes a lot of time!

That’s why I created The Ace Updates. The idea is simple: monthly emails with social media news you do NOT want to miss, directly into your inbox for just £5.

It could be new features that have launched, new rules you need to follow, or algorithm changes happening. And most importantly, this is going to be a jargon-free email. There’s no point in getting the news if you don’t understand it! You can sign up here.