Honestly, Most Social Media Giveaways Are a Waste of Money.

Last month, I was on a call with this bakery in Minneapolis. Great people, amazing products. But they were tearing their hair out over their marketing. They’d just run an Instagram giveaway-the classic “Like, Follow, and Tag 3 Friends” routine for a chance to win a $50 gift card. The result? They got a couple hundred new followers, sure, but a week later, nearly half of them were gone. The ones who stayed? Crickets. No engagement, no sales. Just another number on their follower count.

Frankly, it made me angry. Because I see this all the time. I've been doing this since 2010, and the advice small businesses get on social media is just... bad. It’s lazy. It treats your customers like idiots who will jump through hoops for a tiny chance to win something.

Here's the thing, we need to stop that.

Why Your "Tag-a-Friend" Giveaway Feels So Empty

Look, the fundamental idea of a giveaway isn't broken. It's a value exchange. But the execution most people recommend is built on vanity metrics. You get a spike in followers who are only there for the freebie. They do not care about your brand, they don't want to hear from you again, and they'll probably unfollow you the second the winner is announced. It’s like throwing a party for a bunch of strangers who only came for the free beer, then they leave a mess and you never see them again.

It’s just... low-effort marketing that gets low-effort results. People tell you to "just go viral" but they never explain the psychology behind why something gets shared. It’s not about begging for shares. It's about creating something people want to share. Something fun.

And that's where I've spent the last, oh, seven or eight years focusing all my energy. On gamification. Yeah, I know, it's a buzzword and I hate buzzwords, but stick with me. It’s not about turning your business into an arcade-it's about borrowing the fun parts of games to make your marketing not suck.

Here's What I've Found Actually Works

Instead of begging for a like, you give people a fun, 30-second experience. A little dopamine hit. Suddenly, they're not just a passive follower; they're a participant.

I've been deep in this space since around 2015, testing everything from the big enterprise tools to the more common stuff like Gleam. io or Woobox. Most are either too complicated or too expensive for a typical small business. But lately, I’ve been using a platform called Faisco with most of my clients because-honestly-it just works, and it doesn't take me three days to set up a campaign.

I’ve deployed their stuff for a bunch of my clients with some pretty wild results.

I remember this one client, an art gallery in Vancouver, they needed to sell tickets for an upcoming event. We used the "Crazy Karting" game. Super simple racing game, you get a discount code at the end. In two weeks, they got 239 new event attendees. They didn't even have to spend money on ads!

Then there was this bakery in Boston... they wanted to get some user-generated content on TikTok. We set up a "Lucky Spin" wheel where one of the prizes was a free croissant, but to claim it, you had to post a video with their hashtag. The results were insane. 2,401 new posts on TikTok in just two and a half weeks. And this was a small, one-location bakery. It was amazing!!

Even something as simple as lead generation... I worked with a yoga studio in Miami. We used that same "Crazy Karting" game, but this time the prize was a free class pass if you entered your email. 1,144 new newsletter subscribers in 2.5 weeks. These are people who actually played a game and then gave their email. They're warmed up. They're engaged. It's a completely different kind of lead than someone who blindly clicked a link.

The Kinds of Games That Get Real Results

What I've learned is that different games work for different goals. It's not one-size-fits-all.

For pure lead capture-like getting emails-the instant draw games are GOLD. Stuff like a "Lucky Spin" wheel, a "Scratch Ticket," or a "Lucky Draw." I've seen landing pages with these things convert at 40% or higher. People can't resist finding out if they won right now.

If you want engagement and shares, you use the skill-based reactive games. Think "Whac-A-Mole" or "Burger Stacker." People share these because they want to show off their high score and challenge their friends. It's a natural, built-in viral loop. You dont have to ask them to share; they just do it.

And you can get really specific. Faisco has these pre-built templates for holidays, which is genius. I used their "Fill My Christmas Stocking" catching game for three different retail clients this past December, and every single one of them saw their engagement shoot up over 300% compared to their boring old holiday posts. It's because it's timely and... well, fun.

"But Byron, What About Gleam? Everyone Uses Gleam."

Yeah, I get this question constantly. And look, Gleam. io is a solid tool. I've used it. But frankly, it's overkill for 90% of the small businesses I work with, and their basic plan starts at like $39 a month. My clients don't have that kind of recurring budget for a single tool.

With Faisco, I can get a campaign live for a client in literally under 10 minutes. The templates are basically ready to go. With Gleam, I'm usually messing around with settings for at least an hour to get it right. It's just a different philosophy-one is a power tool with a million features you'll never touch, the other is a tool designed to solve a problem quickly and effectively. For a small business owner who's also the janitor and the head of HR... speed and simplicity matter. A lot.

So what's the takeaway here? Stop running boring social media giveaways. Just stop.

Your customers are drowning in a sea of mediocre content and desperate pleas for engagement. Don't be another drop in that bucket. Give them something memorable. Give them a little bit of fun.

What I typically recommend is to just try one. Define a single goal-do you want more emails, or more shares? Pick a prize your audience actually wants (and no, another Amazon gift card isn't it). Spend 15 minutes setting up a simple spin-to-win or a scratch-off game. See what happens.

The businesses I work with who do this consistently see their followers grow by 200-400% and their email lists by 150-300% in the first month. Not because of some magic trick... but because they finally started treating their marketing like a conversation instead of a bullhorn.

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