How to Promote a Giveaway: 10 Ways to Get More Entries

A good giveaway can attract a lot of attention, but simply publishing it and sharing the link once usually isn’t enough.

You need to keep putting it in front of the right people. That might mean emailing your existing audience, featuring it on your website, working with partners, encouraging participants to invite friends, or giving the campaign an extra push when entries start to slow down.

You don’t need to be everywhere, either. A giveaway aimed at existing customers needs a very different plan from one designed to reach thousands of new people on Instagram.

In this guide, we’ll cover practical ways to promote a giveaway before launch, across your own channels, on social media, through partners and paid campaigns, and even offline.

We’ll mainly use the word giveaway, but most of these ideas also apply to contests, sweepstakes and competitions. The exact rules and legal definitions can vary depending on the type of promotion and where you run it.

1. Get your giveaway ready to promote

Before sending traffic to your giveaway, make sure the campaign itself is ready for it.

Promotion can bring people to the page, but it can’t fix a prize nobody wants or an entry process that’s unnecessarily complicated. Getting those basics right first will make everything you do later work harder.

If you’re starting from scratch, you can browse our giveaway templates for ready-made campaign ideas and layouts you can customize.

Choose a prize that attracts the right people

A good prize doesn’t simply generate entries. It attracts people you’d actually like to reach.

If you sell specialty coffee, for example, a premium coffee bundle may bring fewer entries than a new smartphone, but the people entering are much more likely to be interested in your products. A huge entry count looks good, but it doesn’t mean much if most of those people have no interest in your business once the giveaway ends.

The same principle applies to most businesses:

• A skincare brand could give away a complete skincare routine.
• A fitness company could offer equipment plus a coaching session.
• A SaaS company could offer a year of its product or a useful setup package.
• An ecommerce store could build a prize around its most popular products.

Generic cash, gift cards and expensive gadgets can create a lot of attention, but they also tend to attract people who enter almost anything with a prize attached.

Think beyond the number of entries. Who do you want to still be interested in your business when the giveaway is over?

Keep the entry process simple

Someone should be able to understand the giveaway within a few seconds:

• What can I win?
• What do I need to do?
• When does it end?
• Am I eligible?

Keep the required entry actions and form fields to a minimum. If you want participants to follow social accounts, visit pages or refer friends, consider offering those as additional ways to earn entries rather than turning the initial entry into a long checklist.

Also test the giveaway on a phone before launch. Most small usability problems become much more obvious on a smaller screen.

Use one main giveaway URL

Give your campaign one clear destination and use it everywhere you promote it.

That makes it easier to share through email, social posts, ads, QR codes, creators and partner websites. It also makes tracking much cleaner than sending people to several different pages.

If you’re embedding the giveaway on your own website, it’s still useful to have one primary page you consider the official campaign URL.

Prepare sharing and tracking

If referrals are part of your strategy, set them up before launch. Participants shouldn’t have to copy a generic URL and convince their friends to enter manually.

A personal referral link with a clear incentive is much stronger:

Invite a friend and get 5 additional entries when they join.

You should also prepare tracking links for the main places you’ll promote the giveaway. UTM parameters are enough for most campaigns:

?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer_giveaway

Then use a different source for email, partners, ads and other important channels.

You don’t need to track every click perfectly. What you do want to know is where your visitors are coming from and, more importantly, which channels are producing actual entries.

Before you promote: Check the prize, entry flow, mobile experience, campaign dates, rules, sharing options and tracking links. Also, don’t forget to enter the giveaway yourself once from start to finish.

2. Start promoting before launch

Your giveaway promotion doesn’t have to begin the moment entries open.

A few days of preparation can create some early interest and, more importantly, make sure everyone involved is ready when the campaign goes live.

Tease what’s coming

A teaser doesn’t need to reveal the whole campaign.

You might show part of the prize, post a countdown or simply tell your audience something is coming:

Something good is coming for coffee lovers next week. ☕

Instagram Stories, short videos and email are particularly useful for this because the teaser can be simple and informal.

For bigger campaigns, you could also ask your audience to choose between two prizes or guess what you’re giving away. That gives people something to respond to rather than showing them another generic “coming soon” graphic.

Here is an example how you could do this using a Facebook post:

Get partners and creators ready early

If another business, creator or organization is going to help promote the giveaway, contact them before launch day.

Send them the essentials:

• Giveaway URL
• Launch and closing dates
• Prize details
• Images or video
• A short description
• Important eligibility information
• Their own tracked link, if you’re using one

You can provide suggested copy, but don’t insist that everyone uses it word for word. A creator who normally writes casually will usually get a better response by explaining the giveaway in their own voice.

Prepare several promotion angles

One announcement isn’t enough for a giveaway that runs for two or three weeks. Before launch, prepare a few different reasons to talk about it.

For example, the same coffee giveaway could be promoted as:

• Launch: Win our complete coffee collection.
• Prize focus: Espresso or filter? The winner gets both.
• Referral: Already entered? Invite a coffee-loving friend for extra entries.
• Deadline: Only 48 hours left to enter.

You’re promoting the same campaign, but each message gives people a different reason to pay attention.

It also means you won’t be staring at a blank post halfway through the campaign wondering what else you can say about the same giveaway.

3. Start with the audience you already have

Before spending money on ads or trying to reach completely new audiences, promote the giveaway to people who already know your business.

Your email list, website visitors, customers and community are usually the easiest audiences to reach and often the most relevant.

Email your subscribers

Email is one of the most useful giveaway promotion channels because you’re not depending on an algorithm to show your message.

You also don’t need to limit yourself to one announcement.

For a typical campaign, a simple sequence might look like this:

When	What to send
Launch	Announce the giveaway and prize
Mid-campaign	Remind people and highlight another reason to enter
48 hours before closing	Tell them the deadline is approaching
Final day	Short last-chance reminder

Longer giveaways can support an extra email or two. Short campaigns may only need the launch and final reminder.

Change the angle each time rather than resending the same message. Someone who ignored the first email may still respond to a prize reminder or a clear deadline.

Promote it across your website

Look for places where your existing traffic will naturally see the giveaway.

Depending on your site, that might include:

• Your homepage
• An announcement bar
• A popup or slide-in
• Relevant blog posts
• A customer dashboard
• A thank-you page

You don’t need every option at once. A store might use an announcement bar and homepage section, while a publisher could promote the giveaway inside its most relevant articles.

The best placement is usually wherever your intended participants already spend time.

Use customer touchpoints people often overlook

Your newsletter and homepage aren’t your only owned channels.

A giveaway can also fit naturally into:

• Order confirmation pages
• Shipping emails
• Booking confirmations
• Customer portals
• Membership areas
• Download pages
• Email signatures
• Support follow-ups

For example, an ecommerce store could add a small message to an order confirmation:

Win your next order
Enter this month’s giveaway for a chance to win $250 store credit.

Keep these promotions secondary, though. Someone opening a shipping email still wants their shipping information first.

Share it with your existing community

If you run a Facebook group, Discord server, Slack community, membership area or other private group, don’t forget it.

But avoid dropping the exact same promotional message you posted publicly.

A more natural introduction works better:

A few of you asked when we’d run another giveaway, so we’re sharing this one here first.

Your existing community doesn’t need a sales pitch, they already know you. Talk to them that way. And if you’ve run giveaways before, previous participants can also be a useful audience.

4. Promote your giveaway on social media

Social media is often the most obvious place to promote a giveaway, but posting the same graphic every few days usually isn’t enough.

As mentioned above, prepare several angles before launch. One post can introduce the prize, another can show the product in use, another can focus on the deadline, and another can remind existing participants that they can earn extra entries by referring friends.

Short video works particularly well when the prize is visual. You could unbox it, show what’s included, demonstrate the product or simply record a quick reminder that entries are closing soon.

Stories are useful for more frequent reminders because they don’t fill your main feed with repeated giveaway posts. Countdown stickers, questions, polls and behind-the-scenes content can also give you more reasons to mention the campaign.

Different platforms naturally lend themselves to different formats:

Platform	Promotion ideas
Instagram	Reels, Stories, Collab posts, countdowns
TikTok	Short videos, prize reveals, creator content
Facebook	Page posts, Stories, relevant Groups
LinkedIn	Company posts, employee sharing, business partners
Pinterest	Prize images, seasonal collections, visual products
YouTube	Shorts, video descriptions, community posts

You don’t need to use every network. If most of your customers are on Instagram and TikTok, putting equal effort into LinkedIn simply because it’s available won’t help much.

Before making follows, comments, tags or other social actions part of your entry requirements, check the current promotion rules for the platform you’re using.

Make it easy for other people to share

When you post the giveaway yourself, include a clear link and simple message people can understand without extra context.

Instead of:

Check out our latest campaign!

Try:

Win our complete coffee collection. Entries close Sunday.

The second version tells someone immediately why they should care.

Shareable creative matters too. A strong product image, short video, unusual prize or entertaining contest entry is much more likely to spread organically than a generic promotional graphic.

Will that make the giveaway go viral? Not necessarily. But it gives people something they may actually want to pass along.

5. Reach new audiences through partners, creators and communities

Your own channels can get a giveaway moving, but partnerships are one of the best ways to reach people who haven’t heard of you yet.

The audience fit matters more than the size of that audience.

Partner with another business

A co-branded giveaway can give both businesses access to each other’s audiences.

The best partnerships usually have a natural connection.

A coffee brand might work with a coffee equipment company. A fitness app could partner with a sportswear brand. A travel company might work with a luggage business.

Here is an example where both sides contribute something to the prize and both promote the giveaway:

This can be much more effective than simply asking another company to share your link because both businesses have a reason to make the campaign work.

Work with creators who already reach your audience

A large follower count isn’t always the most useful metric.

A smaller creator with an engaged, highly relevant audience may send far better participants than a general lifestyle account with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Give creators enough information to explain the campaign accurately, but let them communicate it in their normal style.

You can also give each creator a separate tracking link so you can see which partnerships actually produced entries.

Look beyond influencers

Creators aren’t the only people with an audience.

Depending on your market, consider:

• Industry newsletters
• Blogs and publications
• Podcasts
• Customer communities
• Facebook or LinkedIn Groups
• Reddit communities
• Local organizations

Don’t drop promotional links into communities where advertising isn’t welcome. Read the rules and participate appropriately.

If the giveaway genuinely fits the audience, contacting the owner or moderator first can work much better than posting it yourself.

Use giveaway directories carefully

Giveaway and sweepstakes directories can generate additional exposure, especially for consumer campaigns.

But more entries aren’t automatically better entries.

A directory may send people who actively search for giveaways all day and have little interest in your business beyond the prize. That can still be useful when your goal is broad awareness, but it’s less attractive if you’re trying to build a relevant customer audience.

Treat directories as an extra source of traffic, not the foundation of your promotion plan.

6. Turn participants into promoters and build viral reach

A giveaway becomes much easier to promote when participants help spread it for you.

This is where referral actions can create a simple viral loop: one person enters, shares the giveaway, brings in another participant, and that new participant can then do the same.

You can’t guarantee that a giveaway will go viral, but you can make it far easier to share.

Reward referrals with extra entries

Instead of asking people to share simply because you want more exposure, give them a clear reason.

For example:

Invite a friend and receive 5 extra entries when they join.

Each participant gets a personal referral link. When someone new enters through that link, the original participant receives the promised entries.

The loop looks like this:

Referral actions can create a simple loop: a participant enters, shares their referral link, a friend joins, and that friend can then share their own link.

link.

One participant bringing in one more person may not sound dramatic, but repeat that across hundreds of participants and the reach can grow quickly.

With Woorise, you can create giveaways that reward participants with extra entries when friends join through their personal referral link.

Use referral milestones

You can take the idea further with milestone rewards:

• Refer 1 friend → 3 bonus entries
• Refer 3 friends → 10 bonus entries
• Refer 5 friends → unlock an additional prize draw

Milestones give highly engaged participants another reason to keep sharing instead of stopping after one referral.

Just keep it easy to understand. The participant should always understand what they’ll get and what they need to do.

Offer other optional actions

Referrals aren’t the only way participants can earn additional entries.

Depending on the campaign, you might reward actions such as:

• Visiting a product page
• Watching a video
• Following a social profile
• Joining an email list
• Answering a question
• Sharing the giveaway
• Completing another relevant action

Keep these related to the campaign. If someone has to work through ten unrelated tasks just to earn a few extra entries, you’ve probably gone too far.

Use user-generated content when it fits

Photo and video contests can create their own promotion.

Participants aren’t only entering—they’re creating something they may want to share with friends and followers.

A travel company might collect favorite holiday photos. A food brand could run a recipe contest. Or a pet brand could ask customers to submit their funniest pet photo.

If public voting is part of the campaign, participants have another natural reason to promote their entry.

For UGC campaigns, the Photo Voting Contest template is a useful starting point if you want participants to submit photos and let visitors vote.

7. Use paid promotion to reach more people

Paid promotion isn’t necessary for every giveaway, but it can be useful when you want to reach beyond an existing audience or when the campaign supports a larger marketing goal.

It’s also one of the easiest ways to control who sees the giveaway.

Promote the content that’s already working

Before creating a completely separate advertising campaign, look at your organic posts.

If one Reel, video or image is clearly getting more attention than the others, it’s a good candidate for paid promotion.

You already know people are responding to it, which is a better starting point than guessing at a new ad from scratch.

Target people who are likely to care about the prize

Avoid making the audience as broad as possible simply because almost everyone would like to win something.

If you’re giving away photography equipment, reach photographers. If the prize is a year’s subscription to your software, target people who might realistically use it.

A relevant prize plus relevant targeting usually produces a healthier audience than a generic prize shown to millions of people.

Retarget people who already know you

Paid promotion can also be used to bring back people who visited your site, interacted with your content or saw the giveaway but didn’t enter.

This can be especially useful during the final few days.

Someone who ignored the first announcement may respond very differently to:

Entries close tomorrow.

Watch quality, not only cost per entry

A campaign producing $0.20 entries isn’t necessarily better than one producing $1 entries.

Look at what happens after people enter.

Do they engage with your emails? Visit your products? Refer friends? Become customers? Or do they disappear immediately?

Cheap entries from an audience that has no connection to your business can make the campaign look successful while delivering very little value.

8. Promote your giveaway offline

Giveaway promotion doesn’t have to stay online.

If you have a physical store, attend events, ship products or meet customers face to face, offline promotion can be particularly effective because you’re reaching people who are already interacting with your business.

Use QR codes

A QR code gives people a quick route from a physical location to your giveaway.

You could add one to:

• Product packaging
• Receipts
• Posters
• Menus
• Table displays
• Flyers
• Event stands
• Product inserts

Keep the message around the QR code specific.

Instead of:

Scan here

use:

Scan to enter for a chance to win a €500 travel package.

Don’t make people scan first and figure out why afterwards. They should know what they’re opening before they take out their phone.

Promote giveaways at events

Events, conferences, exhibitions and in-store promotions are a natural fit for giveaways.

You can use the giveaway to collect registrations, encourage people to visit a booth or give attendees something to do while they’re there.

Include the giveaway with existing orders

If you already ship physical products, package inserts are another simple option.

A card inside the box could invite customers to enter a giveaway, scan a QR code or share their purchase for an additional chance to win.

This audience already knows your business and has bought from you, so you don’t need to work as hard to explain why the prize is relevant.

9. Keep promoting until the giveaway closes

Most giveaways get a burst of attention at launch and another near the deadline.

The quiet period in the middle is where promotion often gets forgotten.

You don’t need to talk about the giveaway every day but you do need to keep it from disappearing completely, here is a simple schedule to follow:

Stage	Promotion
Launch	Email, website, social posts, partners
A few days later	New creative or prize-focused message
Midpoint	Referral push, creator reminder, fresh content
48 hours left	Deadline reminder
Final day	Last-chance email and social post

Refresh the creative

If someone ignored the same giveaway image twice, showing it to them five more times probably won’t change much.

Try a different image, video or message.

Show the prize being used. Highlight one part of the bundle. Share a participant entry. Mention how many days are left.

days are left.

Sometimes you don’t need another promotion channel at all, you just need to give people a new reason to notice the campaign.

Make the deadline visible

Urgency is useful because it’s real. If the giveaway closes Friday, say so.

Messages such as “48 hours left”, “Ends tonight” or “Last chance to enter” give people a reason to act now instead of saving the giveaway for later and forgetting about it.

10. Avoid these common mistakes

A few promotion mistakes can waste traffic or make a good giveaway harder to grow.

Using all your promotion at once

Don’t email your list, activate every partner and launch all your ads on the same day.

Spread some of that activity across the campaign so the giveaway keeps resurfacing instead of peaking on launch day and disappearing a week later.

Expecting referrals to grow without an initial audience

Referral actions need people to start with.

If only ten people see the giveaway, there isn’t much of a viral loop to build. Share the campaign through your own channels, partners or paid promotion first, then let referrals extend that reach.

Making the social-to-entry journey too difficult

Test the giveaway from inside the apps where people will actually discover it:

Post → link → giveaway page → entry → confirmation

Go through the whole process yourself instead of assuming it works because the page looks fine on desktop.

Promoting to people who can’t enter

Ads, creators and referrals can quickly push a giveaway beyond its intended audience.

If participation is limited by country, age, shipping area or another important condition, make that clear before people click through. There’s little value in paying for traffic from people who aren’t eligible.

Changing important details halfway through

Fresh creative is useful. Changing the prize, deadline, eligibility or entry rules after people have already joined is different.

It can confuse participants and, depending on the campaign, create compliance problems. If you need a midpoint boost, change the promotion rather than quietly changing the giveaway itself.

Forgetting the winner follow-up

Participants often return after the closing date to see what happened.

Where appropriate, confirm that a winner has been selected, announce the result with permission and thank everyone who entered. A real winner can also provide useful social proof for your next campaign.

Confusing viral reach with valuable reach

A sudden traffic spike can look impressive, but check where it came from.

Traffic from a relevant creator, customer referrals or a good partner is very different from thousands of entries from people who enter every giveaway they find.

More reach is useful only when at least some of that reach is bringing you the people you wanted in the first place.

Giveaway promotion checklist

Before launch

• Choose a prize relevant to your target audience
• Test the complete entry flow
• Prepare tracking links
• Set up referral or sharing actions
• Prepare several promotional messages
• Brief partners and creators

When the giveaway launches

• Email your audience
• Promote it on your website
• Post across your main social channels
• Activate partners and creators
• Add relevant offline promotion
• Launch paid promotion if needed

During the campaign

• Refresh your creative
• Encourage referrals
• Give the campaign a midpoint push
• Check which channels are producing entries
• Increase urgency near the deadline

After it closes

• Announce or contact the winner
• Follow up with participants
• Review your promotion results
• Save the best-performing channels and creative for next time

Promote the giveaway, not just the launch

Promoting a giveaway works best when you spread the effort across the whole campaign, not just launch day.

Start with the audience you already have, make the giveaway easy to share, bring in partners or creators where they make sense, and use paid or offline promotion when they can help you reach the right people.

If you want the campaign to build viral momentum, focus especially on referrals. A good prize may get someone to enter, but a clear incentive to share is what can help one participant bring in the next.

If you’re planning your next campaign, Woorise gives you the tools to create and publish giveaways, add referral and bonus-entry actions, manage participants and winners, and keep everything in one place.

You don’t need every tactic in this guide. Pick the ones that make sense for your audience, keep the giveaway visible until it closes, and pay attention to what actually brings in good participants. That will give you a much better starting point for the next campaign.

Frequently asked questions