The advent comping season is now well and truly underway and despite a challenging 2020 there’s a lot more competitions than we anticipated. Today we passed the 500 individual company competitions mark which is pretty good – not only from those involved – but for Loquax as well. A big thank you to those who posted, added extra social media links and reported issues as the list accumulated.
12 Days Is Better Than 24
But what have we learnt so far about Advent Competitions 2020? Well advent is rapidly becoming 12 Days Of Christmas competitions. It does seem that a lot of sites/brands are opting for the 12 days of prizes approach instead of 24. In many ways that does make a lot of sense. From their perspective it means that prizes can be sorted out and sent out hopefully before Christmas. This means that when folks return after the festive break they’re not having to fullfill or chase prizes that have been lost or forgotten about. Another reason why 12 Days probably is better idea than 24 is that interest does tend to wane. Advent fatigue sets in – not just from compers – and the number of entries do start to fall. We’ll be looking at a few stats later in the month but even after one day our visitor levels dropped by 10% – having shot up by almost 50% on the 1st. We suspect that by the time we get to the 9th and 10th of December we’ll be back to our usual visitor numbers.
Instagram Advents Takeover
So what else have we learnt? Interesting Instagram is now the social media battle field of choice for many brands. At time of writing we have over 240 different accounts listed that are running giveaways. In truth there’s probably a lot more than that! In comparison in 2016 we had just 10 brands with advent promotions. From a comper’s perspective that isn’t great news as many Insta advents require commenting and sharing, which if you do too much of it can result in a ban. As well as getting advents listed we have also made some little tweaks to our advent tracking and listings. There’s nothing revolutionary going on but just some additions that make sense. For example we know some users still use the forum as their source of competitions. The advent tracker has been added to posts and mirrors the main advent lists. So if you click ignore then the forum post will also show ignore. It works as a good cross reference for those switching from forum to list too.
New Sorting Options
Another addition was a simple but effective one. We know some users like to enter just web based competitions or just Facebook ones – but perhaps you wish to narrow the choice down a little – say target beauty prizes only. By adding a quick ‘Sort By Category’ link you can now do that. So for example here’s the Facebook Advents in prize category groups. This option is as well as sorting by type, date, sitename etc plus the ability to implement blocking by prize, category and poster. Overall we’ve been very happy with getting Advent 2020 underway on Loquax. Our new server has survived it’s biggest test to date which is a massive bonus. Firstly it justifies the hard work put in by Kirsty during the early months of the year getting us ready to move from our home of 20 years and secondly it puts us in a comfortable place going forward. Now all we need to top things off is to hear of some exciting wins from you all who are entering the competitions.