Do give aways actually work to get site members?

[Beverly]

A very old technique for getting forum members and email subscribers is to offer a freebie or giveaway. However, don't these type of giveaways also attract freebie seekers who will quickly unsubscribe (or go inactive on a forum) as soon as they gain access? How do you combat the freebie seekers when giving away valuable content?

 

[Miss K.]

I once tried giving away an amazon voucher to whoever got the most new members to sign up in a month. Nobody managed a single one! That was disappointing

 

[Jerlene]

It definitely works if it's done right. Don't just run a contest and expect members to come and join and or participate.

 

[Jordan]

I once tried giving away an amazon voucher to whoever got the most new members to sign up in a month. Nobody managed a single one! That was disappointing

This forum had a several contests that gave some nice prizes. $800 webmaster contest and a $300+ business in a box contest to name a couple.

I like to think the $300 business in a box got some good valuable members. :whistling: I stuck around. After words even ended up having @xpl0iter contacting me in regards purchasing the forum long time after. Then I started the $800 webmaster contest. We had some users participate, but not a lot. We got I think 2 extra users who stuck around. That is it The contest was not that successful at all even after all the marketing and prize list.

I suppose it just depends on whats going on, how active your current forum is, and where you market it. Regarding the people who only come to try and win free stuff, that will always happen. Just part of doing contests xD

 

[Sam1]

WebGurubb's most successful contest was: http://www.webgurubb.com/threads/webgurubb-10-000-post-milestone-contest-announcement.1392/. I'd estimate we gained 5 active members from that (for a while) and probably a couple of thousand posts.

The two contests which I took charge of were only moderately successful. The topic creation competition produced 125 new topics and the business in a box comp. had maybe 650- 800 posts directly because of it.

 

[Creaky]

I have seen them work before, other times one the give-away is over everyone disappears again.

 

[Summit]

I see a lot of people just come on for the gift. If you do it right though, you can easily get more attention , and keep the members!

 

[wasi90lk]

I think giveaways often help forums to get active members. Many people (including myself) love it when forums give away prizes.

 

[Shortie]

I believe that they do yes however I feel with giveaways the results will only last as long as they know the giveaway is going on and then you find that they slowly die down until they hear of another giveaway. Unless you can find a way to do giveaways and keep people active even after the giveaway has finished it's something I do not feel works in the long run.

 

[hedonologist]

We had a give-away once where the most active member of the month would receive a prize, the winner then ended up disappearing soon after, but a few members did stay at least, so not a complete waste. You have to remember that by offering a give-away people are coming primarily for that and not to become active members, its just sometimes a fortunate side effect that they do stay.

 

[Ed321]

Giveaways get you the eyeballs, but it is up to the content to get them to stay.

There is an old adage about saying a name three times to remember it or completing a task three times to make it a habit. Contests and giveaways work best when a task needs to be completed multiple times. Showing up and signing up once is like a sweepstakes. They don't work well to retain the person who signed up.

In the past, I have used giveaways that ran from a week to a month. They required daily input for the weekly or once a week input for the monthly. My sites weren't forums and the input was normally answering a question where the answer could be easily found by quickly browsing the website. Questions were like:

What year were we founded? (Easily found on an about us page.)
Do we ever share sell your email address? (Easily found on privacy policy page.)

You get the idea. Makes them surf your site beyond a giveaway signup screen and hopefully they have found something they liked on your site or know more about you when they need your services in the future.

Can still apply to forum sites. Post in 7 different threads over 7 different days to qualify for X giveaway. If your forum is of interest to them, hopefully they have found something that interested them enough where they will continue the discussion after the contest period.

Many different ways to go, but the input I can provide is make it an ongoing event and not a one-time sign up if you want retention.

 

[ormaybeso]

I think it works pretty well for attracting people but that in no way means that you're going to keep them. Keeping people coming back to a forum is hard in itself for many people, especially if the topic is generally quite obscure and doesn't apply to many people. A giveaway would just attract leechers who take the stuff and leave, the few people you gain will usually be worth less than what you gave away.

 

[Maximum]

Do giveaways actually help you get active members? Well the answer to this is yes & no.

It just all depends on what type of giveaway it is and what are the prizes.

 

[HyperActive]

It depends how you look at it. Usually yes, but members are most likely joining just to enter the giveaway, and then will disappear forever. I've done quite a few giveaways thinking they would help, but they did bring in new members, and afterwards they vanished and never came back.

Posting/Referral Competitions are much better because it requires people to actually post or refer more members to join.

 

[proxynvpn]

If done right then yes they can work. The only problem you may encounter would be to have people register just for the giveaway so you need to find a way to have them register and want to stick around which is the difficult task.

 

[wallcat]

You still need to ensure that the type of people who'll be attracted by the freebie are the ones that'll be interested in what your website has to offer. Ideally the freebie will be a sample of what you're offering and will lead them naturally into wanting more. You could offer the freebie to loyal members instead; Only if they've been an active user for so long will they get something out of it. Although you do have to be careful of people spamming if you offer the freebie in exchange for a certain amount of activity. Taking the quality of activity into account is also important. I can imagine that giveaways will work when done correctly, but it can also attract the wrong type of people too.

 

[pwarbi]

When it comes to asking if these kind of competitions work or not, I don't think there's a straightforward answer.

As far as attracting new members into a site or forum I don't think they do, because your most likely to get people signing up for the promotion, then when it's finished they'll disappear never to be seen again. If the competition you run though is for existing members only though, I do think that can help activity on a site and that can only be a good thing at the end of the day.