Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Topic Tuesday: Giveaways

Episode 13: Giveaways
 
 
So I have held a couple of giveaways in the past and ive decided to go ahead and talk about them a little bit if you have never done on and are thinking about holding one.
 
What can you give away?
Anything your heart desires as long as it's legal. So no, you can't give away alcohol to minors, or drugs or distribute an ebook that you bought once and want to keep sharing it.
I have given away Mockingjay posters in the past, movie tickets, books, an author offered an ecopy to a winner, notebooks, currently considering giving away my old copy of THG movie. It all depends on what you want to do and want to give away for people :D Its free stuff, people appreciate free stuff xD
 
What do I use for giveaways to keep them fair?
The best way to keep track of entries and to choose a winner at the end fairly, is by using rafflecopter. I am not being sponsored to say that rafflecopter is the best way to hold giveaways in MY personal opinion. You can put the entries that are valid, they are all in one spot, ends at the exact same time for everyone, no need to stay awake till 12 your time to post the end of a giveaway. At the end of the giveaway, you can also log on to pick a winner and rafflecopter uses random.org to pick a random entry. You can then check that whatever entry the made is done correctly and is valid. If not, you can disqualify the person.
 
Disqualified!
So in rafflecopter it will tell you who the person is and what they entered, and what I like to do is check that in fact they did it. If they say they followed my instagram, I go and check, if they say they tweeted something, I check. If an entry is invalid, I disqualify the person and choose another one. Some people decide to go ahead and block people that have lied on their entries or deleted their entries before time. I just ignore them and move on to the next person. Its not a big deal to me as long as I check and they don't win what they don't deserve.
 
What do you put as entries?
Anything really, within reason. If an author is helping me with the giveaway, I like to put them in there. So if author A wants me to put their newsletters or following on social media, I put that as an option as well as my own. I like to make them easy. Twitter following, optional twitter posting, following on instagram. Many of these people are already following, and they simply have to put their info. I also like to ask questions, out of personal curiosity, like what country/state they are from and they get an entry from that. If it is an instagram giveaway, I do make it REQUIERED that they follow one of my instagram pages. I would never include that they have to buy anything from me or give me a shoutout or anything like that. It just doesn't seem right TO ME!
 
Extra Entries?
What I mean by that is that people could post like a tweet about the giveaway or an instagram image every day and submit it for extra entries. That's something that could be done, that some people like to do for a greater chance at winning. All up to you.
 
Why are they good?
There is no solid answer for this. Some people do it to gain followers, others do it for the feel of sharing, others do it to get rid of things they don't want and some even do it to bring awareness to something. Everyone that holds a giveaway can do it for a number of different reasons :D
 
 
 
So yeah, that was that, I enjoy giveaway, to ask some questions and see all the different answers, it makes me feel appreciated in a certain way.