Growing our followers is one thing every social media platform manager wants.
In the olden days of social media, if you were the lucky ones to jump onboard and take advantage of gaining massive organic growth, then props to you.
But if you missed the boat, like many of us, then we need a different strategy to grow.
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Good content simply does not cut it anymore these days if you want to get a following.
You need a strategy in place to get that boost in followers.
And one of the best and most effective strategies that still work today is running giveaways.
Giveaways are one of the better strategies that have aged with time.
With new tools such as Gleam to help you automate and manage the giveaway, a lot of the old school manual tasks you need to do is a thing of the past.
Features & Functionality
Gleam is a business growth platform for business to grow online. They have four applications on their platform:
- Competitions
- Rewards
- Gallery
- Capture
Competitions
Gleam’s competition module was what the platform started with and is well known for. The competition app allows marketers and business owners to seamlessly run a giveaway with the landing page and winner picker functions all built in.
A unique feature of Gleam’s giveaway platform is that they have a viral loop feature built in. The platform runs on a points based system, where giveaway entrants can complete various tasks to get more points and increase their chance of winning.
The benefit of this is so that businesses can get one entrant to do more than one task, from simply following the page, to commenting on a post to ultimately sharing the giveaway with their friends, Gleam is able to track the actions of the users and assign them points accordingly.
Rewards
The instant rewards module is similar to the competition module, where users can complete a set range of tasks in order to receive a prize – as the name suggests – instantly. This is handy when you have visitors coming into your website, and you want to capture their details before they leave without buying, so you direct them to the instant rewards page, to get them to like you page or give you their email, in return for a small discount or gift.
You can then run retargeting ads or an email sequence to that some of that traffic or audience converts into sales.
Social Galleries
Social galleries is an app that lets you create image galleries to embed on your site or to direct people to. You can set the app to curate images from multiple channels, from a hashtag on Instagram or a photo submission.
This tool can be handy when you’re running events or conferences where you want to showcase all the user generated content that gets captured and showcase what everyone is doing.
Capture
Capture is a way to building up your email list, using opt in messages to build your email list. With a large variety of pre built templates and 3rd party integration, building up an email list with your site traffic can be done seamlessly.
Add-ons & Integrations
One of the biggest benfiits of Gleam compared to other giveaway tool competitors is their sheer number of integrations. With most of the main marketing tools you can use, Gleam is able to connect with them.
This will mean you don’t need to worry about manually transferring your leads from one platform to the other, when they can talk to each other.
Email Marketing Integration
Having Gleam integrate with your email marketing tool will mean you can
Ease of Use
Another reason why Gleam has been so popular in the giveaway space is due to their ease of use – for both the ones running the giveaway and the ones participating.
Setting up a giveaway
As we can see here, with their prebuilt templates, setting up a giveaway is no more than just editing what’s on built already.
From start to finish, there are only 5 steps to take to set up a :
- Setup
- User Details
- How to enter
- Prizes
- Post Entry
By following this through, you can have a giveaway ready for people to enter, with a viral loop built in if you set one of the tasks as ‘invite your friends’ for points.
Plans & Pricing
A perk when using Gleam is that you only need to pay for what you need. As we mentioned that Gleam has four different applications, you have the option to just pay for the ones you use, or get a bundle deal and save.
Gleam’s Competition app starts at just $10 a month, and if you want the full package, you can get the whole bundle for $97.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Well designed application
- Easy to set up and use
- Viral loop built in
- Multiple lead generation and capture tools on one platform
- Free trial available
Cons
- Doesn’t fully integrate with social media actions, pressing follow on the giveaway takes you to the Instagram page in need for the user to ‘follow’ the page again.
- Not as cheap compared to other (but less sophisticated) giveaway tools.
Help & Support
Gleam’s support service is quite simple. Customers can send an inquiry form in for the customer service team to respond.
Documentation
Gleam provides documentation on how to use each application. The documents are step by step instructions on how to set up a campaign and should cover everything you need to have something up and running in no time.
FAQ
Gleam also has FAQs sorted out per application to help answer some frequently asked questions.
Guides
Gleam has pre written guides on how to create different types of contests.
Final Thoughts
To wrap it up, Gleam is a fantastic tool for you to use when you’re running giveaways. The single fact that it has a viral loop built in, where entrants are incentivised to share the competition with others for an extra chance to win.