Rafflecopter Pro Tips: Comment Interaction

Here’s another installment of ‘Rafflecopter Pro Tips’ :)

Last time we discussed optimizing the ‘Choose Your Own Task’ entry option. This time, we’ll discuss how running a Rafflecopter giveaway affects your blog comments in relation to running a giveaway in the blog comments.

Pro Tip Summary: We encourage all Rafflecopter users to use the “Leave a Blog Post Comment” entry option anytime you think the entry could be considered a conversational entry.

When we started Rafflecopter, we studied how folks were running giveaways using blog comments. While we thought it was interesting how blog comments were being utilized, there were downsides. You could never have a conversation in the comments section with the hundreds of comments created for entry purposes. That led us to the conclusion that there were two kinds of entries in these giveaways run in blog comments: conversional and non-conversational entries.

Conversational entries would be any time you had to leave a comment that might spark a discussion. Conversational entries include answering a question, discussing a product you’d like to try, or writing something about the company sponsoring the giveaway.

Non-conversational entries would be any other entries that wouldn’t spark a conversation, but were mainly for entry purposes: leaving a URL for a tweet, Facebook share, typing in your Facebook name for a Facebook ‘like, leaving a twitter handle for a twitter follow, etc.

We’ve been designing Rafflecopter to improve everyone’s giveaway experience from different angles. Our hopes are that Rafflecopter will consolidate all your non-conversational entries in the widget, while all conversational entries are visible for everyone to see in the comments, opening up the comments section for, well, comments!

We hope this means you and your sponsors can browse the comments section of your giveaway blog posts w/o digging through hundreds of non-conversational entries. A great example of conversational entries shown on a giveaway blog post thanks to Rafflecopter can be seen on on Simply Stacie’s blog here and here.

Several other advantages Rafflecopter brings to the table relating to blog commenting:

  • your reader’s email addresses are now hidden from the public
  • no more filling out annoying captchas or waiting 30 seconds to leave another comment
  • instead of you hosting all those hundreds of comments, Rafflecopter does the heavy lifting

Do you agree? What other advantages have you come across? Chime in and let us know your thoughts on the subject!

 

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About the author

Greg Goodson

Greg Goodson is the cofounder of Rafflecopter. 25x ultramarathoner, bluegrass guitarist, & weather enthusiast. Owner of one doge.

  • Jodi @ Completely Coupons

    I thing rafflecopter looks great, and you already have me sold on it, but it seems Ill never get an invite… cant hold off on the giveaways any longer

  • Katrina @ The Interrupting Cow

    Still waiting on an invite!  And I’ve got the perfect giveaway that will begin sometime this week!  Hoping I get an invite soon!

  • Tiffany Cruz

    This is great. I know a lot of my blog entrants didn’t like their e-mail being public. Thanks for hiding them.

  • I love that I can pick and announce a winner with the push of a button!  No more using a third party random integer generator and then weeding through the comments, etc.  Saves me time which is ALWAYS a huge plus in my book!!

  • I am hesitant to use because I am worried my page visits will drop off! 

    • Leslie Mayorga

      I worry about the same thing.  I just started a Rafflecopter giveaway this morning though and I am going to give it a whirl.

  • Anonymous

    I have a suggestion… I’ve noticed lately more blogs hosting the same RC across multiple blogs, and sometimes they only want one set of entries, and sometimes it’s OK that you enter through each blog (although most of the time they don’t make it clear on the post).

    Could you maybe add a setting to your RC that they can maybe check whether it’s OK to enter through each specific blog, and then you could display a message in the Terms and Conditions – something like:

    Please only enter through one of the host blogs – multiple entries will be deleted.

    ~or~

    You may enter this giveaway through each of the host blogs to increase your chances of winning.

    (I’m not married to the verbiage, just throwing out ideas).

    I’d also like it if you’d code it so the ending date always displays in the Terms and Conditions…. sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t.

    thanks for letting me vent :)

    • Anonymous

      Those are great suggestions. Right now, if a Rafflecopter widget is hosted on multiple pages (multiple blogs, Facebook pages, etc…) you can enter once in each place it’s hosted. If the folks running the giveaway would prefer you not to, we leave it up to them to put that in the T&C.

      We’re working on a sign-in system that will take care of a lot of these sorts of things, and it will be more clear how often you’re allowed to enter from each location. It’ll also provide some very nice features for folks entering the giveaways, like never having to enter your name/email again, even from contest-to-contest and site-to-site. It’s coming soon, I promise :)

      As far as the date goes, it’s not obvious, but if you hover your mouse over the “X days left” on the widget, it will show you the full time/date that the giveaway ends.

      Thanks for the suggestions, and thanks for taking the time to get in touch with us. We really appreciate it. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you ever have any more suggestions, or comments/feedback, or if there’s ever any way we can help. We’re happy to do whatever we can :D

      • Anonymous

        Thanks for the reply :) The problem I’m seeing is that the bloggers aren’t putting it in the T&C, but then it comes up later so I’ve wasted a lot of time and effort entering on each of the host pages.

        That’s why I thought it would be nice if you could program it so that if they checked a setting, the appropriate line of code would appear. It wouldn’t prevent people from entering through each blog but at least it would be clear what the expectation was.

        I didn’t know that was where you could also find the ending date/time, thanks for that :)

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  • Denise G

    I am not computer literate at all.  So anyone considering or thinking about using rafflecopter come on and try it.  Greg walks you step by step through anything you don’t understand or is questionable to you.  Great customer service!  I love rafflecopter – the ease of picking your winners.  The ability to look at IP addresses and see people that are trying to enter more than once.  You have the ability to delete those extra entries.  Thanks Greg and thanks Rafflecopter!

  • I don’t like how people that enter a giveaway can see the name of everybody else that entered.  Can’t it just saw how many people entered?  Not that they entered 5 times or whatever?  Or is that something on the moderator sees?  It looks like everbody can see it.

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  • This is a wonderful topic – a topic that is so close to my heart. I love blog commenting for various reasons. But the first and the foremost reason is that it allows me to jump into conversations – sort of saying hello to even the remote stranger. I’ve built a lot of genuine long term connections just via blog commenting.

    Of course it does take time. But anything serious does take time and effort. And I find that I enjoy doing this!

    As to the length of a blog comment – yes, length doesn’t matter. You cannot say that a long comment will be of good quality and that a short comment is crappy. But it is also true that one cannot say amazing, in-depth opinion in a one-liner comment.

    As we say with blog posts – we should not judge the quality of a post by its length. But it is quite obvious that you cannot cover a topic in-depth in a 500 word blog post. So length does become a factor here.

    But while leaving a comment, one should not aim for length (or word count) but be comfortable with the number of words it takes to get the point across

    Regards
    Ashley Jones

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