2K / 2500 Giveaway: A Retrospective

Brace yourself. There's going to be a lot of numbers in this one. Also, I have a degree in math and was a class short of a statistics minor. In other words, I'm like 80% reliable. Ish. My goal of this post is to help you decide whether doing a giveaway would be "worth it" for you.

Our 2K / 2500 giveaway just ended and the three winners were announced today. Side note, if you run a giveaway, don't just announce the winners in a story. Do a separate post to announce the winners or at least update the original giveaway post with the winners.

Our 2K giveaway was going so well, we hit 2500 followers and decided to add in another prize package. We didn't gain 500 followers from it, we actually ran the 2K giveaway when we had 2,356 followers. We threw together the prize pack in less than 48 hours. We reached out to companies we were pretty confident would donate and respond in a short period of time. I don't recommend doing something so last minute, it added a bit more stress.

This was our fourth giveaway and by far, the most successful, even with our blimp. Let's jump right into it. The numbers.

For context, when we shut down the rogue 2K giveaway, it had 742 likes and 3,613 comments. This redo had 834 likes and 1,219 comments. Significantly less comments, but it was limited to 2 tags / entry with a max of 10 entries versus unlimited plus it was recommended that people make one comment with all their tags.

We had:

• 2,159 total entries

• 550 unique users enter

• 140 unique reshares as posts / stories

• 1,597 users were tagged that were not following us

• Of those 1,597 users who were tagged AND were not following us, 142 entered

• Of those 142 new users who entered, they brought in 67 new accounts that also entered

• 57 users with the max of 10 entries

• 15 users who didn't follow directions (tagged private accounts, didn't follow us / sponsors)

• 35 post saves

• 233 private shares (via messages)

• 3,412 accounts reached (48% were not following us)

• 265 followers gained (not every new follower entered the giveaway)

• 2,015 unique users tagged

• One user was tagged 34 times, the most any user was tagged

I probably spent about 8 hours working on the giveaway. Most of the time spent was after the giveaway had ended, pulling comments and writing my own custom code to extract the data I wanted. To be honest, I have no idea how people are gathering 500+ post comments. There's really no reliable software out there that does this that doesn't require logging into your Instagram account, money, or can reliably get ALL comments, not just ones made by public accounts. If you know of a website / software that can do this, let me know. I'd love to compare. Once I cleaned up my data and extracted a list of names, I used Wheelofnames to select a winner. It caused the browser to crash quite a few times attempting to add 2,159 entries.

Some extra data points (our data size was between 100 - 250):

• 71% of people think users should be banned from winning giveaways if they follow then unfollow.

• 62% of people think tagging companies / big name accounts shouldn't be allowed.

• 35% of people think giveaways are rigged.

• 95% of people would prefer giveaways that don't require tagging.

• 32% of people were just in it for the Woodpeckers Tools (this was probably inflated a bit, some of them were my buddies being funny).

• 26% of people think 1-25 users unfollow after a giveaway ends. 30% think 25-50 unfollow. 15% think 50-75 unfollow. 29% think more than 75 unfollow.

  • 19% of people think you should shuffle your list of entries once. 45% think shuffling three times. 22% say shuffle five times. 14% say shuffle 10 times.

  • 95% of people think a redraw should be done if the drawn winner didn't follow the rules.

This was A LOT of numbers, I know. Little more. I spent $18.20 on shipping prizes. Alright, that's all the numbers I'm going to throw at you.

I'm quite confident no other giveaway in the history of giveaways can provide such comprehensive data. One of the big reasons I put so much effort into this was because 35% of people thinking giveaways are rigged is quite high. A bit depressing really. I made a point to provide the list of entries in our stories and about a dozen people went and verified their name was on the list. Another 10 or so sent a direct message wanting to verify their entry. I honestly loved that people were looking. I wanted people to be confident that my list was 100% correct.

I don't know how many people have unfollowed so far. Well, I do know. About 5-10. I do have a list of people who were following us the morning of 1/29/2021 before I posted the giveaway results. I'll check in a week or so to see how many people unfollowed. It's not about banning them from entering future giveaways. I really don't care about that. I simply want to know how many people unfollow a week later, two weeks later, etc. Numbers. That's my thing.

So. Here we are. Is running a giveaway "worth it" to you?