I have recently ended the first-ever giveaway I have hosted. And I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to share what I have learned from it with the community here. 

What did I give and how could people enter

I decided to give away 4x $5 in crypto. Why do it like that? Well, my main thinking is I wanted to be able to give something back and do that too as much as I can. And $5 seemed an ok amount, and 4 winners as well. Plus it came to $12 in total for me. And while that is not a lot to many it is still a decent amount to me. 

And the choice of crypto seemed fairly easy as well. As that is the topic covered in a majority of cases here. =)

And I decided to only include people who are following me. But I did think about limiting it to only "old" followers, but then decided not to. As that seemed like a meh thing to do. Plus this giveaway could help me get some new followers, pushing me towards my next goal of 1000 followers.

I thought about what people should do to be able to enter. And liking and tipping were pretty fast ruled out. The main reason for it was it sounded pretty shallow and self-serving to have people like and tip a post in order for them to enter the contest. I myself hate to do things like re-tweet and like to get entries in a giveaway. So why force others to do it?

Also, there is no real way to verify people actually have done it. The only way to do it would be to force them to provide a screenshot or something like that. And well, no. Just no.

Instead, I had three simple rules of what they needed to do. And these were:

1. Leave a comment on this post AND be a follower of mine.

2. Make sure you have followed 1. 

3. Belt and suspenders on, last chance to make sure you have done everything in 1.

So in a sense as long as they left a comment on the post, no matter what that comment was. And they followed me they would be entered.

What conclusion can I make about hosting a giveaway

The nice thing was that every one of the comments, but one, was very positive and congratulatory. Which was a nice surprise. The other was probably my favorite, mostly so because it was a bit unexpected.

You’ve now reached your maximum number of daily tips, you must now wait until the timer expires before you can send another tip. -WinterYetiMonkey 

So if you want to get a little pick me up and give your confidence a boost. Then I can recommend hosting a giveaway. ^^ But on to the more interesting parts.

Are you planning to do a giveaway, what will you gift then?

The number of participants I had was "only" 47. And I say "only" only because this is the first so I have no real reference to use, but it sort of looked a bit low to me. If I look at the total number of views the post got, it was 1310. That means the conversion rate of viewers to participants was 3.59%. 

If I compare that to a slightly more recent post of mine. Where people could use a referral link and get a free NFT. They could also use the normal non-referral link, of course. But I don't know how many did that compared to the referral. Anyway, I digress. The number of conversions here for a free NFT was as follows. 58 / 1105 gives a conversion rate of 5.25%. Which is a lot higher than the 3.59% on the giveaway. 

Sure these are the only two data points I have to compare. But it looks like people are more interested in free NFT than a chance to win $5 in crypto. If anyone else has done a giveaway or has any referral data to share then please let me know. I would love to hear your numbers. We could do it on discord or over email if that is preferred. Or some other way.

Another thing I noticed on the post was that it got a fair bit more likes than my normal post, with regard to views. Over the last 30 days my ratio of likes per view, excluding the giveaway post, is 0.028. And for this post 0.053, which is almost double. 

But the post also looks like it performed worse and better in the tip department. My normal average tip per 100 views over the last 30 days is 5.25 cents. And this post got 5.40 cents per 100 views. But if I look at my other recent posts the giveaway post is more on par with a post with 300 viewers less.

I think the fact that I was away for 7 days not posting anything might have skewed my numbers slightly. So take them with a handful of salt. 

Followers

This is perhaps the most interesting part of it all. Over the 4 days the giveaway was active, it spend a little over 2 days on the front page. I have gotten 52 new followers. But I am only sitting on a total of 549 followers, so that means I have lost 3 during the last days as well. =/

The gains break down as follows:

• 5 followers Monday 12th
• 5 followers Sunday the 11th
• 14 followers Saturday the 10th, the last 4 to enter the giveaway
• 16 followers Friday the 9th
• 12 followers Thursday the 8th

The conclusion here is that a lot more people left a comment, thinking that would be enough for them to be able to enter the giveaway. Or at least I will assume that is what is at play here. Or my notification here on Publish0x can have missed some followers.

As it happened, one person was drawn as a winner and was not a follower. So unlucky for them. ^^

One thing to note as well is that I got my account verified here on the 9th. So that might have helped me to boost my followers to some degree. At least the last couple of days.

If I look back and do the match from when I joined Publish0x, it was April 22. I got to 500 followers on September 1st I think it was. That makes it 500 followers in 131 days. Or 3.82 per day on average. And if we compare the number of followers gained over the first 3 days of the giveaway we get a whopping 14 new followers. Or 10.4 if we take the whole time the giveaway was active into account. Either way, those numbers are very high compared to the average number I have gotten while active hire. 

But in fairness, I should disclose that I have not been active for all of the 131 days. And that most likely lowered those numbers slightly. 

Conclusions

To summarize this first giveaway. I think it was a success. And I hope that the people that follow me feel I care and that they are important to me. Because they are. And will I have another giveaway down the road? I probably will. What shape or form will it take, I can't really say that now. 

Would I recommend everyone to do a giveaway? Well, I guess that depends. It depends on your reason for doing so. If you want to give something back to your community then yea. A giveaway can be a great way to do that. If you want to grow your following, then my answer would be again it depends. It depends on the reason why you want more followers. If you want more followers to be able to earn more. Then paying $20 for 52 followers is a pretty bad deal. They have to tip a lot of posts for me to be able to recoup the $20 spent. 

If you want to get more followers for some other reason. Like being able to partake in a content creator program. If I remember Biswap has one but you need at least 5000 followers to be able to partake. Then sure, it will definitely speed up the process of getting there. 

If you want to do a giveaway to get some buzz going and have a post trend on the first page. Then I can honestly say that the giveaway did not trend longer than a normal good post has done. This is despite the crazy amount of engagement on the post with comments and likes. Just try and do a good post, it will be more beneficial in the long run for you.

And I would say the same goes for trying to get some nice tips on your post, simply by having a giveaway. You will not be able to "earn" back the value of what you give away. So doing one to try and rake in some cash. At least here I would say that is a no-go. And to be honest, that is not a very good reason to host a giveaway anyway. =)

I hope that you found this post informative and use full for you. In case you were thinking about hosting your own giveaway. And if you have any questions regarding my experience please ask away. And if you would like me to cover some other Publish0x topic let me know. As always the comment section is open to you dear reader.

If you would like to support me and the content I make, please consider following me, reading my other posts, or why not do both instead.

See you on the interwebs!

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