As a Freebies site, we often list competitions alongside our deals and free samples. But these kind of competitions are different to the ones we’re talking about in this post.
This post focuses on how you can improve your chances of winning competitions directly with a company, brand or influencer, where they are running a specific giveaway across their website and social media accounts. Usually in these cases you’ll have to like, share or submit your email address to be in with a chance of winning.
Some of the best competitions receive hundreds of thousands of entries and while competition winners are supposed to be chosen at random, truth be told a lot of the time, there’s nothing random about it. Follow our tips below and let us know on our socials how you get on.
The Best Ways to Win Online Competitions
1. Engage with the brand.
If you want to be seen the best way to do that is by engaging with the brand, regardless of whether they’re running a competition. If you have some favourite companies, or people you follow whose content you like, make sure you tell them and support them, as this will make your account more memorable when it comes to entering their competitions.
We aren’t running any direct competitions at the moment, but as we mentioned above if you follow any of these tips, then let us know on our socials – it could help you out if we ever were to run one ourselves.
2. Enter frequently.
If you only ever enter big competitions, or when you see one from a company you really like, you are hugely limiting your chances of actually winning anything. The trick to getting lucky is to increase your chances in the first place.
If you enter a few online competitions a week, you’ll end up winning something in no time and once you have that first taste of success, it all goes up from there. Competitions Time lists some of the latest competitions from some of the biggest companies in the UK, so that’s a good place to find some inspiration.
And be sure to have a dedicated email account for signing up to competitions – it makes sure you don’t fall victim to email scams or become inundated with spam – but also allows you to keep everything organised and avoids any emails getting lost within your junk folder, which would be especially problematic if you’d won. The same applies for dedicated social media accounts.
3. Have a following.
The majority of companies, especially smaller ones, are ultimately running competitions as a marketing tactic – either to boost brand awareness, or collect data.
So when it comes to those that enter these competitions, it therefore means the ones with the larger followings have more to offer the companies in return. While companies shouldn’t be actively selecting people that have larger followings, you can see why they would – there is a sweet spot though, as if they choose someone with a huge following it soon becomes obvious.
4. Aim big and small.
This one goes hand in hand with entering frequently – look for the smaller competitions from start-up companies, or smaller brands, as they’re going to have a lot less entries. Only ever entering the big giveaways will leave you disappointed, but winning some of the smaller ones will keep you motivated as a competition-er, which ultimately could lead to a big win.
Bigger brands also do small giveaways where they give thousands of products away, so it’s worthwhile always entering these too. Some of these smaller competitions, such as one by Jaffa Cakes, is live on our site right now, so if you’re new to this, why not start there?
5. Time it Right.
This one could potentially be the most important one in the list and doing this alone could make you a winner. Just like with having a larger following, although companies are supposed to choose randomly, we see time and time again a correlation between people that win and when they entered.
A lot of companies simply don’t have the time to go through what can be tens of thousands of entries, and although there are ways to export data and then simply choose a randomised winner, ultimately all of this data takes time to gather, especially if the competition is running on 5+ channels.
Entering just before the competition is set to close means your data is captured right at the very end, and is therefore more likely to be seen. If a company is simply checking through the last hundred entries, then you know you’re in the mix.
Some of the tips listed above will help here too – if you’ve engaged with the brand a lot for example, you’ll be in with an even bigger chance of being noticed.
So, are you a serial competition-er? Let us know on our socials if there’s anything we’ve missed. And our post on how to avoid email spam may come in use too.
