How do you get people to buy your book? You give it to them for free. Hosting an online giveaway is one tactic that will provide a bit of extra publicity for your book. Facebook, Goodreads, and Amazon have functions on their sites that give writers the opportunity to organize their very own book giveaways. The question is: which platform is best for you?
Facebook
Fortunately, running a Facebook giveaway is as easy as writing a Facebook status! However, once your contest is up and running that doesn’t necessarily mean people will be willing to participate. These steps will help ensure that your giveaway runs as smoothly as possible.
1) Determine how you want participants to enter your contest
On Facebook, there are several different ways participants can enter an online giveaway. You can ask users to tag a friend, like a post, like your Facebook page, share a post, or fill out an online form. It is best to choose a method that helps promote your page while also being easy to enter. Contests that require too much work from participants may discourage users from participating.
2) Create the online book giveaway post
Review Facebook’s rules for online contests before you create your giveaway post. Once you have an idea of what you want to do, create your post! Be sure to include some sort of attention-grabbing photo that also contains relevant information regarding the contest. It is also a good idea to pin the post to the top of your page during the duration of the giveaway. This will ensure that all visitors will see it.
3) Promote, promote, promote!
To help the contest gain traction, share it across social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and your own personal website. Having contestants tag their friends in the post will allow the post to appear in more newsfeeds. You can also use a custom hashtag to encourage online engagement for your book.
4) Choose a winner
Once the giveaway comes to an end, it is time to choose a winner. The Good Luck Fairy tool is possibly one of the most efficient way to choose a random winner for Facebook competitions. In fact, the tool can give you several winners based on different criteria such as identifying winners who liked, commented, and/or shared a post.
5) Follow up
Reach out to the winner immediately. Tag the lucky reader in a congratulatory post so that others are aware that the giveaway has come to an end. Then, communicate with the winner privately and ship them their prize. There have been times where people have left negative reviews on products and company pages because shipping took way too long. To prevent this from happening to you, ship the book in a timely manner and provide the winner with a tentative arrival date.
Before you get started on your Facebook contest, don’t forget to read through Facebook’s guidelines regarding contests.