5 Steps To Running A YouTube Giveaway With Gleam

Running a YouTube giveaway is a powerful way to boost engagement, grow your audience, and reward loyal fans.

With Gleam, you can set up and manage your giveaway effortlessly. Here’s a step-by-step guide to running a successful YouTube giveaway using Gleam.

The steps are simple...

1. Choose Your Prize
2. Create Your Giveaway
3. Promote Your Giveaway
4. Draw Winners
5. Follow Up & Keep Engaging

When you start planning your giveaway, the first thing to think about is the prize.

This matters because it decides what kind of giveaway you can run and what actions you’ll ask people to take to enter.

For example, if you have a YouTube channel where you share workout routines, you’ll want a prize that fits your content so you attract the right audience.

If you’ve got a bigger budget, you could give away something like a full home gym setup. Since that’s a high-value prize, you can make entry a bit harder, maybe asking people to submit videos of themselves doing your workout on social media.

If your budget is smaller, you might give away exclusive content or a pair of running trainers. In that case, the entry requirements should reflect that, like following you on social media and tagging a friend.

It’s all about getting the balance right and making sure you’re targeting the right people.

Pick the right prize, and you’ll attract high quality participants.

After deciding on your prize, set up your giveaway. You can run it directly on YouTube by asking people to comment under a video. With this method, it can be tricky to make sure the winner is selected fairly and randomly.

For more control and to run a way more powerful giveaway campaign, lots of people opt for a third-party platform like Gleam. It simplifies the process, tracks entries, and offers actions for participants like:

• Visiting your YouTube channel
• Submitting a YouTube video
• Social media actions, like following you on X
• Sharing the giveaway with friends
• Visiting your website

You can also add cross-promotional actions that would be nearly impossible to track manually if you’re getting a high number of entries. For example, you can require people to:

• Sign up to your mailing list
• Engage with content across multiple platforms, like finding secret codes
• Submitting UGC

We handle fraud protection, winner selection, and terms and conditions for you.

Plus, we create a hosted landing page for every campaign, so you can share your giveaway easily, even without a website.

Have a play with our template below and see how easy it is to get started!

Then, of course, you need to make sure people actually know about your giveaway—how to enter, when it starts, and when it ends. Otherwise, no one’s going to take part!

The best ways to get the word out are:

• Share your giveaway link everywhere, social media, newsletters, YouTube descriptions, wherever your audience is.
• Use relevant hashtags to boost discoverability, and if you can, team up with influencers or creators in your niche to reach even more people.
• Embed the Gleam widget on your website to make it super easy for visitors to enter without leaving your page.

The more you promote, the more entries you’ll get!

Once your giveaway ends, selecting a winner is quick and hassle-free with Gleam.

You have a couple of options when it comes to picking a winner:

• Random Selection – If your giveaway is a simple prize draw, you can use Gleam’s built-in random winner generator to pick a winner instantly. This ensures fairness and eliminates any bias.

• Manual Selection – If you want to pick your winner based on merit, you can do this by manually selecting the entry of your choice.

Gleam also makes it easy to review and verify entries before confirming a winner. Entries will be flagged as invalid if someone has not actually completed the required actions (e.g., followed your social account then unfollowed straight away), you can review those and check them yourself too.

After your giveaway ends, don’t just disappear, keep the momentum going and stay connected with your audience.

• Offer a consolation prize like a discount code or exclusive content to keep non-winners engaged and encourage them to stick around.

• Keep new subscribers interested by sharing fresh content, updates, and behind-the-scenes insights. Make sure they don’t just enter and leave!

• Plan your next giveaway early so you can maintain excitement and keep engagement levels high.

• Showcase user-generated content from video contests in a gallery or on social media to highlight your community and encourage more participation next time.

The goal is to turn giveaway participants into long-term fans, not just one-time entrants!