2K Giveaway = 3613 Comments = Account Limited: What Happened

To be honest, I'm pissed off. This should've never happened and it certainly wasn't our intention. All we wanted was to give back to fellow woodworkers.

This was the fourth giveaway I've done so it wasn't my first rodeo. I even used the same hashtags as the other ones and the prize pack had a lower monetary value than two previous giveaways.

So, what happened? This shit.

A whole bunch of random private accounts started tagging other private accounts / bots and it exponentially grew out of control. It's simply not normal to have a post suddenly get thousands of comments in a short amount of time. This caused our account to get flagged and limited by Instagram.

So what went wrong?

The Lowe's Gift Card

This was simply too generic. It opened the flood gates to allow pretty much anyone to enter, woodworker or not.

Unlimited Entries

I'd never allowed this before. All the previous giveaways were limited in some way. I thought I'd do it for this one since the prize pack was smaller.

My Lack of Action

I should've known better. I should've known there was something horribly wrong when it got to 2K comments. I should've taken action sooner and stopped it, but I didn't because I was so caught up and excited about it having so many comments.

By the time I thought to take action, it was too late. Our account was limited. I couldn't view the activity feed or any comments on any of our posts whatsoever. All I could see was this repeated popup informing me our actions have been limited.

I went back and forth about what the correct thing to do was. Should we leave the post up and just filter out the junk comments? Should we take it down and redo it? I didn't want to piss off legitimate accounts who entered correctly, but I didn't want to condone the spamming accounts.

I even made a poll in the stories to get the opinions of others. It ended up being split 50 - 50. I tried disabling comments first to see if that would help restore our account access. It didn't. I chatted with about a dozen fellow woodworkers and ultimately, we decided the right decision was to take it down. It simply was not worth losing our account over. We figured if we explained why and what happened, people would be understanding. Hopefully. This was truly our last resort.

Some people are going to think we did it for the followers. Truth be told, we don't get that many followers from giveaways. Even with the spam accounts, we gained about 200 new followers and I estimate about 100 of them are spam.

Moving Forward.

We will repost the giveaway once our account access is fully restored. It'll be for the same items, but with significantly more limitations. No private accounts. No more unlimited tagging. Woodworkers only.

We're truly and genuinely sorry this happened and if it's caused you any inconvenience, we honestly did not intend for it. We're incredibly fortunate to be able to give back and for Woodpeckers Tools to have enough faith in us to run a giveaway. We know we're in a position of privilege and don't take that for granted.

Respectfully,

Judy + Marley