Why Your Last Giveaway Flopped (It Was Not the Prize)

Why do some social media giveaways build a loyal following while most just flop?

It is not the prize. If your giveaway is built around getting people excited about what they might win, you get a short-lived spike of freeloaders who disappear the instant it ends. The giveaways that build a lasting audience lead with entertainment instead: they are genuinely fun to take part in, win or lose, so people stick around for the content long after the prize is gone.

The prize is not the point

It feels counterintuitive, given the word "give-away" has the reward right there in the name. But leading with the prize is exactly why most giveaways fizzle.

You will get a bump in followers, a few leads, maybe a couple of sales, and then it dies out, because everyone came for the prize and left when it was won. Make the whole thing fun to take part in and something different happens: people follow you for the experience, and they keep coming back for more of it afterwards.

Giveaways versus quiz shows

Think about the giveaways you have personally entered. You probably cannot name the brands behind them or even the prizes you were chasing.

Now think about your favourite quiz shows. You remember the host, the catchphrases, the rules, maybe even specific questions. Both are built around giving away prizes, so why is one forgettable and the other etched into memory? Because a quiz show is not really about the prize. It is about entertainment, and it is fun whether you could ever win or not. Millions watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire without any chance of taking the money home. Humans simply never tire of being entertained, and it is no different online.

Three brands that got it right

The proof is in the campaigns that took off:

• Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" swapped its logo for popular first names and invited people to share a photo of their bottle. No purchase required. Sales climbed and the brand gained around 25 million new Facebook fans.
• TOMS ran "One Day Without Shoes", asking people to go barefoot for a day and post a photo with a hashtag to enter. Again, no purchase needed, just something fun to do. It generated more than 27,000 Instagram posts.
• A small bookshop in Austin ran a literary scavenger hunt: find and photograph specific books, then post them with a hashtag. In a single day, 1,370 people came through the door, and plenty bought a book or a coffee while they were there.

Fun equals engagement, and engagement equals followers, leads and customers.

Ideas you can steal

You do not need a nine-figure budget to make a giveaway entertaining. A few formats that work:

• A virtual escape room, where each puzzle your followers solve earns an entry, run across one carousel or a series of posts.
• A digital treasure hunt that sends people hunting for clues across your website and social channels, with more entries for the more they solve.
• A "carry on the story" game, where followers continue a story in the comments and you pick a winning line each day to build into the next instalment.

Every one of these rewards taking part, not just winning, which is the whole point.

Meet Brian

Turning a plain "like and share to win" into something people genuinely enjoy takes a steady flow of entertaining ideas, which is exactly what Brian, our AI Comedy Marketing Machine, is built to produce.

Brian helps you dream up fun, on-brand giveaway concepts and the funny content to run them, using the same frameworks our writers use, so people fall in love with your brand rather than the prize.

Take Brian for a spin and make your next giveaway one people actually remember.