How long do giveaways last

It robs your campaign of a sense of urgency, thus making your target audience feel like they have more than enough time to participate, which can make your potential entrants postpone any type of engagement, and ultimately lead to losing interest in your giveaway. This usually results in spending more money on promotion and boosts that would hopefully pick up your giveaway campaign.

Efforts that, in most cases, prove futile. Although each giveaway campaign requires a unique approach in terms of marketing strategy, a two-week campaign has proven to be the most optimal solution. Whether it is a service, a product, or a blog giveaway, 14 days is the sweet spot as it provides enough time to keep your campaign alive, relevant and exciting, without leaving much room for the sense of urgency to drop beyond repair.

Our research also suggests that most giveaway campaigns yield the best results in terms of volume and quality of entrants within the first and the last 3 days of your campaign. Determining how long should your giveaway last is just one part of the puzzle.

You also need to think about when your audience is online and most likely to participate in your giveaway. Having in mind the great content saturation, people often feel overwhelmed with the amount of information they get exposed to on a daily level.

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. 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. Running your contest for a 1-month duration gives you enough time to launch it with the right momentum. You might notice that many giveaways and contest posts include body copy that refers entrants to a set of rules and guidelines in their bio.

Pointing your entrants to specific terms and conditions signals that you mean business about your giveaway. As displayed by Lonely Planet, a simple landing page or blog post detailing t he specifics of your contest is more than enough.

You can also use a terms and conditions template such as this one from Wishpond to get started with sorting out the fine print of your giveaway.

The more opportunities you have for your entrants to get in touch with you about your giveaway or contest, the better. In addition to other social channels such as Facebook or your email list, anything you can do to promote your giveaway beyond Instagram is a plus.

In fact, one of the best places to promote your giveaways is on-site. Pretty cool, huh? If you have a relatively small following, you may be able to monitor entries on your own. That said, those with tens of thousands of followers are likely going to need some extra help in promoting and tracking the performance of their giveaways.

For example, Shortstack allows brands to create giveaway entries on-site based on pre-existing templates. To take your giveaways and contests a step further, platforms like Gleam allow for multiple entries to provide your campaign a sense of competition.

Gleam can pick winners at random or based on their entry actions as noted below. Either of these tools can help build awareness for your giveaway. Regardless of your promotion strategy, simply make sure you integrate Instagram into your website in some way, shape or form so that your on-site traffic stays in the loop. For example, you can exclude entries after your deadline or discount any entrants that did not include a specific mention or hashtag:.

Once your winner is selected, a quick follow-up is in order. After tagging and requesting a DM, simply ask your winners for their name and email address. You could communicate delivery of their prize via DM, but email is definitely preferable if you plan on going back-and-forth with your winners.

Last but not least, no Instagram giveaway is complete without reviewing the metrics and KPIs. Again, you may decide to use giveaways purely for branding; however, understand how your giveaways perform in terms of followers, engagement, conversions, sign-ups and traffic will all clue you in on whether or not your content was a success by the numbers. Additionally, social tracking tools such as Sprout Social can help you understand your level of engagement and how many new followers you score during any given Instagram campaign:.

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