COD Giveaway Lessons Learned

⏱ Estimated Read Time: 2 minutes

From October 15th - November 1st I ran a giveaway for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War with the goals of thanking day-one followers, promoting my stream, attracting new followers and increasing engagement on the channel.

Below were my main takeaways.

Did It Work? - 🤷

Somewhat, but not really. Followers rose from 40 to 70, a 75% increase, over the period that we ran the giveaway. However, majority of those followers came despite the giveaway and more due to promotion of the channel itself.

So would the same number of people followed without the giveaway - probably.

  • Over the same period, I increased promotion of channel, both via discords, community networking and just blasting it on social media.
  • The actual goal was to grow to 100 followers, which in itself was probably a stretch goal since the contest only ran for 2 weeks and had no means or rewards for its virality.
  • The giveaway itself required its own promotion that was outside of the channel itself. So the choice was between promoting the channel to promote the giveaway or promote the giveaway in hopes of promoting the channel. I chose the former.

What Would I Do Different 🤔

  • The biggest failure IMO was limiting it to a single channel, Twitch. Promoting it across Twitter, Instagram and even Discord should have been ways to enter. i.e entry for every RT or tagging 2 other people.
  • UX. The more you have to teach or explain your UI, the worse it is. While it seemed simple initially, earn dubs -> trade dubs for tickets, both tasks required explanations that weren’t intuitive, especially since you have to use chat commands for all steps of it. A GUI would have simplified this for sure, but even simpler would be to auto-enter everyone.
  • Make virality a reward. Back to point #1 users who help spread the word, RT, tag on Instagram Twitter would have helped with the promotion and potentially helped with the original issue of needing to spend as much time promoting the contest as I did the channel.
  • Better graphics / branding. The whole thing from conception to execution was pretty rushed. Should have done a better job of planning and organizing and engaging users.

Conclusion

All things considered, the giveaway was as much a thank you to existing viewers as it was about growth, to that end it was a success. Chat participation went up, maintaining that will be a challenge.

Overall takeaways are nothing crazy but come down to - plan better and make sure all pieces are in place beforehand. Engage growth across as many platforms as you can, no reason to limit it to just one. Lastly, make it as easy for people to participate.