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Hacking Giveaways to Increase Followers/Sales

Anyone has any strategies on hacking giveaways to increase your audience / sales?

Just did a TL;DR summary of Pieters Levels's (NomadList) case study of how he conducted a giveaway on Twitter to get the following results:

  • 1,459,193 views,
  • 80,368 engagements,
  • 54,061 profile clicks
  • 11,723 retweets

Here are the main points from his article:

Offer an enticing gift

  • Pieters promised a new 🍏MacBook Pro 16 to a random person who retweets his tweet
  • All participants are required to follow him on Twitter in order to be eligible for the prize

Impossible to pick a winner from the RTs due to Twitter's API limits

  • Due to Twitter's API limits, it will only list out the last 100 retweets
  • if you paginate, you will get the same last 100 retweets"API that lets you list RTs has disabled pagination.
  • It is impossible to get the full list of people who had retweeted

Know how to pick a winner

  • on his friend's suggestion, Pieters followed the following manner to pick a winner:
  • "pick a random follower from my current total follower list (78,000 at this point), then go to their profile to check if they RT'd it and see. If they didn't, get another random follower and repeat, until you find someone. With 78,000 followers this should take about ~8 tries."

It is 3x cheaper than buying ads##

  • Final result from the campaign: 1,459,193 views, 80,368 engagements, 54,061 profile clicks and 11,723 retweets
  • CPM (cost per thousand impressions): $3,000/(1,459,193/1000) = $2.05
  • According to Pieters's calculation, when Q3 2018 data for Twitter's ads (CPM) was $5.93, it was 3x cheaper than buying ads

Unable to ascertain the real impact of this giveaway and other downsides##

  • "is nice for your vanity metrics but doesn't do much for your business"
  • "I didn't see much effect on revenue."
  • "I don't know which of the new followers or people who saw the tweet will stick and sign up now or tomorrow or in a few months"
  • attracting the wrong audience: some followers will do what is required just for the prize, resulting in a spam of unsuitable followers who will eventually disappear.

Is a giveaway like this a viable strategy to grow your business? Or do you have a better way to run a giveway than this case study? Let discuss more in the comments.

Check out more TL;DR summary of strategies for your business, head over to Growthunt and check out our database.

  1. 1

    Another brilliant strategy would have to be Morning Brew, who uses a sophisticated referral system of rewards to get to 1.5 million subscribers in less than 2 years.

    Truly remarkable.

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