Straight answer: people enter online giveaways because the prize feels achievable, the entry takes under 30 seconds, and someone they trust is already vouching for it. Everything else, the branded hashtags, the “tag five friends” gimmicks, the beautifully designed graphics, matters far less than most marketers want to believe. Strip a giveaway down to those three things and entries go up. Ignore them and you’ll get a pretty campaign that nobody bothers with.
The prize is doing 80% of the work, not your brand
I’ll say the thing most giveaway guides won’t. People are not entering because they love you. They’re entering because they want the thing you’re giving away, and if someone else offered the same prize with your logo scrubbed off, most entrants wouldn’t notice or care. I’ve run giveaways for an iPad, for a bundle of my own ebooks, and for a straight cash prize, and the cash one outperformed everything else by a mile even though it required zero creativity from me. That’s uncomfortable for anyone who wants to believe their giveaway is “building a community.” Some of it is. Most of it is people who want free stuff and will unfollow the second the winner is announced.
That’s not a reason to skip giveaways. It’s a reason to be honest about what they’re for. A giveaway is a reach and list-building tool, not a loyalty programme. Once you accept that, you stop being disappointed when 70% of entrants vanish after the draw, because that was always the deal.
Friction is the single biggest entry killer
Here’s a number worth remembering: giveaway platforms like KingSumo and Gleam have published data for years showing that every extra required action drops completion by roughly 10 to 20%. A giveaway that asks for an email address alone converts wildly better than one asking for email plus a follow plus a share plus a tagged friend. Stack four actions on top of each other and you can lose more than half your potential entrants before they ever hit submit.
I saw this directly. In 2019 I ran a giveaway for a bundle of marketing ebooks with a single-step entry, just an email address, and got 6,200 entries in five days. A few months later I ran a similar prize but added “tag three friends who’d love this” as a requirement, thinking it would multiply reach. Entries dropped to just under 900. The tagging step didn’t add virality, it added friction, and friction is what people bail on.
If you’re building a giveaway around a seasonal push, say a Black Friday campaign, the same rule holds: keep the ask simple and let the incentive do the persuading rather than the mechanics. I’ve put together editable Black Friday and Cyber Monday email templates for exactly this reason, so the entry ask stays clean and the design doesn’t become another barrier.
Social proof convinces people faster than any copy you write
Nobody wants to be the first person to enter something that looks empty. A giveaway post sitting at 4 comments feels risky. The same giveaway sitting at 400 comments feels safe, popular, worth a shot. This is why giveaways gain momentum in bursts rather than steady lines, once the entry count crosses a threshold that feels “alive,” new entrants pile on because other people already vouched for it with their own participation.
GoPro understood this instinct long before most brands did. Their user-generated content contests worked because entrants could see thousands of other people’s photos and videos already submitted, which made joining feel like joining a movement rather than gambling on an unknown. I’ve written before about how deliberately GoPro built that dynamic into their wider marketing strategy, and it’s one of the clearest examples of social proof turning a giveaway into something closer to a community event.
Practically, this means the first 24 hours of your giveaway matter more than any other stretch. Seed it. Get ten friends or existing customers to enter and comment in the first hour if you can. That early activity is what convinces the next hundred people to bother.
Trust in who’s running it matters more than the prize’s actual value
A £50 prize from an account people recognise and trust will out-convert a £500 prize from an anonymous or brand-new account almost every time. People have been burned by fake giveaways on Instagram and Facebook for years, accounts promising iPhones that never existed, so entrants have developed a filter. They check follower counts, they check whether the account has posted before, they check comments for anyone saying “is this real?”
This is partly why giveaways run through established influencers convert so much better than the same giveaway run cold. The influencer’s existing trust transfers to the offer. It’s also why picking the right partner matters more than picking the biggest one, since an influencer with 20,000 engaged followers in your niche will often drive better quality entries than one with 500,000 followers who post about everything. I go into this in how to choose the right influencers to work with, and the short version is: relevance and existing trust beat raw reach when it comes to giveaway participation specifically.
A visible, honest deadline pushes fence-sitters over the edge
Vague giveaways (“running for a while, winner announced soon”) lose entries to procrastination, because there’s no reason to act today rather than next week, and next week never comes for most people. A giveaway with a stated close date and a countdown, even a simple one in the caption, converts better because it creates a real reason to act now instead of later.
I test this constantly on Instagram Stories, where I’ll run a giveaway with a sticker countdown timer. The entry rate climbs sharply in the final six hours every single time, sometimes accounting for a third of total entries in that last window. That’s not because people suddenly discovered the giveaway. It’s because deadline pressure moved them from “I’ll do that later” to ” let me do this now.” If you’re trying to grow a following through this kind of mechanic, it pairs well with the tactics I cover in how to get more followers on Instagram, since a well-timed giveaway is still one of the fastest ways to spike follower count in a short window.
The prize needs to feel winnable, not just valuable
People do a quick, subconscious calculation before entering: how many other people are likely competing, and is it worth my thirty seconds. A giveaway for a Tesla will get huge entry numbers but low actual investment from each entrant, because everyone assumes their odds are near zero anyway, so there’s nothing to lose by entering with a throwaway effort. A giveaway for a £200 coaching session with a stated cap of 500 entries feels winnable, and entrants who believe they have a real shot tend to engage more, comment more thoughtfully, and stick around after the draw.
This is why niche giveaways often outperform broad ones on a per-entrant quality basis even though the raw numbers look smaller. A giveaway aimed specifically at small business owners for a marketing audit will pull fewer entries than a generic “win an iPhone” post, but a far higher percentage of those entrants are people who might buy from you afterwards. If list quality matters more to you than list size, design the prize to filter for your actual customer rather than for the widest possible crowd.
The mechanics people enjoy versus the ones they tolerate
Comment-to-enter still performs the best on most platforms because it’s low effort and instantly gratifying, you type a sentence, you’re done, you can see your entry sitting there in the comments. Follow-to-enter performs well only when paired with something else, since a follow alone doesn’t feel like enough of a commitment to trigger urgency. Email sign-up performs the worst in raw entry numbers but the best in lead quality, because it asks for something people guard more carefully than a follow or a comment.
Quiz-style or “answer this question” entries sit in the middle. They filter out low-effort entrants, which some brands want, but they also cut total volume noticeably, often by 30 to 40% compared with a plain comment-to-enter setup, based on what I’ve seen running both formats back to back for similar prizes. Choose the mechanic based on what you need afterwards, reach, leads, or content, not on which one looks the most creative in a deck.
Where giveaways fit into a wider content plan
A giveaway that sits alone, disconnected from everything else you post, tends to produce a spike and then nothing. The accounts that get lasting value from giveaways treat them as one piece inside a bigger content marketing strategy, following the giveaway with content that speaks directly to the new audience it brought in, rather than going quiet for two weeks afterwards. The giveaway gets people through the door. What you post in the following fortnight decides whether any of them stay.
It’s also worth checking your numbers against wider benchmarks rather than judging a giveaway in isolation. The kind of engagement data collected in things like the social media facts roundup I put together gives useful context for whether your giveaway’s engagement rate is strong or just looks strong because you’ve never compared it to anything else.
What I’d tell someone running their first giveaway
- Pick one entry action. Not three. One.
- Make the prize relevant to your actual customer, not just broadly desirable.
- Seed the first hour with real entries from people you know so it doesn’t launch looking empty.
- Set and show a real deadline, ideally under two weeks.
- Plan your follow-up content before you launch, not after the winner’s announced.
- Accept that most entrants will disappear afterwards, and design the prize around the ones who won’t.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the single biggest reason people don’t enter a giveaway they see?
Too many steps required to enter. Every extra action, follow, tag, share, comment, quiz, cuts your entry numbers, often by 10 to 20% per additional step based on standard giveaway platform data.
Do bigger prizes always get more entries?
Not proportionally. A prize that feels winnable with a smaller, defined pool of competitors often converts better per view than a huge prize that feels like a lottery, because entrants assume their odds are hopeless and put in less effort accordingly.
Does requiring people to follow the account work?
It works best when it’s the only requirement or paired with just one other simple action. Stacked on top of tagging friends and sharing to stories, it becomes another piece of friction that quietly kills your completion rate.
Should I judge a giveaway’s success by entry numbers alone?
No. A giveaway with fewer, more targeted entries from your actual audience is often worth more than one with ten times the entries from people who’ll never buy anything from you. Decide what you need, reach, leads, or content, before you set the mechanic.
Related reading: How to leverage giveaways and contests to grow your business and How To Create an Online Course People Will Actually Want To Take.
