How To Run a YouTube Giveaway

A sweepstakes is a promotional campaign where you offer a prize to motivate people to take specific actions, such as subscribing to your mailing list, following you on social media, or engaging with your content.

It’s a fun and effective way to grow your YouTube channel, connect with your audience, and promote your brand.

YouTube is an ideal platform for hosting giveaways, however, running a successful one takes some planning.

From understanding YouTube’s rules to choosing the right format, there are key steps to follow to make your campaign impactful.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to create a giveaway that resonates with your audience and helps you achieve your goals.

• 1. Decide the Type of Giveaway
• 2. YouTube Guidelines and Your Official Rules
• 3. Choose a Prize
• 4. Promote the Giveaway
• 5. Pick and Announce Winner
• 6. Offer Up Consolation Prizes

The right giveaway format depends on your goals and audience.

Whether you want to drive subscriptions, comments, or cross-platform engagement, we've got you covered.

If you want to gain some insight into what your subscribers are interested in, run a comment-to-win giveaway where participants comment a response to a question on your YouTube channel.

If you want to drive traffic to not only your YouTube channel, but your other social media platforms or website, try running a more powerful giveaway campaign with Gleam.

With Gleam, you can create a landing page for your giveaway, which you can link directly from your YouTube descriptions. This is ideal if you don’t have a website.

Participants enter by completing actions you set, like subscribing to your YouTube channel, commenting on a video, following you on Instagram, or joining your newsletter.

Check out our fully customisable and easy to use template for a classic YouTube giveaway using Gleam:

If you want to drive engagement, try a secret code scavenger hunt.

A scavenger hunt works by hiding a secret code in your content to get viewers to engage more closely with your YouTube channel.

For a simple YouTube scavenger hunt, announce the code at a specific moment in your video. It’s a fantastic way to get viewers to watch all the way through from start to finish.

Once you’ve decided how to run the giveaway, make sure you’re following all of YouTube's official rules and guidelines.

When running a giveaway on YouTube, you need to not only make sure you follow YouTube's official rules and guidelines, but you also need to include clear terms and conditions. Gleam will automatically create these for you, so you only really need to worry if you are running your giveaway manually.

Your terms should cover entry requirements, dates, prizes, and a disclaimer that YouTube isn’t affiliated. Link to the Community Guidelines, make sure you disqualify non-compliant entries, and comply with YouTube’s Terms of Service.

Also, it is best practice to state that YouTube isn’t a sponsor and include a privacy notice on data handling.

An attractive prize is the main incentive for people to enter your giveaway.

Make sure your prize is relevant to your audience so that the entries and leads you attract are from potential customers, not just people interested in the prize.

You could even try partnering with complementary brands to offer an even more valuable prize.

Next, promote the giveaway everywhere so people know it’s happening.

There’s no point in running a giveaway if no one sees it to enter!

The best ways to spread the word are by posting on your social media main feed and sharing reminders in your stories.

Other great places to promote include your mailing list, website or blog, and even mentioning it in your YouTube videos leading up to the launch.

Just have a think about where most of your audience are and then make sure you spread the word there.

Picking the winner is a crucial part of your giveaway.

Announcing the winner properly reassures people that your giveaway is legitimate and worth entering. Plus, it can build excitement even after the giveaway ends.

Consider fun ideas like announcing the winner with an exciting video or drawing the winner on a live stream to make it even more engaging!

Gleam can manage every aspect of the winner selection process.

We can also take care of the terms and conditions so that your contest complies with all necessary guidelines and legal requirements.

This allows you to focus on engaging with participants and promoting your contest, while we handle the admin.

Offering consolation prizes to those who didn’t win can be a great way to keep people engaged and encourage them to enter future giveaways.

This extra touch shows appreciation and gives users more reason to stay involved with your brand.