Social Media Book Giveaway Contest Follow Up

When I decided to do a book giveaway, my intentions were certainly noble.  I genuinely wanted to give them away.  However I also wanted to measure how a contest would impact the traffic to my site from a visitor and engagement standpoint.  Best of both worlds. I would also suggest this excellent site for daily giveaways where you can win some awesome gifts.

First off, thank you to everyone that left a comment on the site.  I always appreciate when people take the time to leave read anything I write, especially when they take the time to leave a few words.

I knew running a contest would give my blog a traffic and engagement boost, but I was definitely curious to see how much exactly.  Here’s the raw data:

• -31 Comments (6 times the norm)
• -30 Tweets (30-40% higher then average)
• -8.1/10 PostRank (50% higher then average)
• -187 page views (about the norm)

So my takeaway is that obviously my reader engagement increased quite a bit.  There was an incentive to do so, but page views weren’t really effected.  I would say that what the contest did for me was encourage existing readers of my blog to engage, not so much attract new readers.  Let’s be honest, it was only a few books so it wasn’t the sexiest giveaway.  Hopefully I can come up with something bigger in the near future.

At the end of the day, doing a contest on your blog will definitely give you a boost in your reader engagement, but the real hope is that by working in a contest or two, you can start to earn additional trust and regular visitors to your site, but it takes more then that.  You have to engage back, and find the time to reciprocate on those readers that visit that blog as well.

And without further ado, the winner of the Social Media Book Giveaway is Sue Koch!  Congratulations to Sue and thanks to everyone for participating!