Searching For Wins

Hello everyone!  How is your week going, any nice wins to report?  One more win for me since we last spoke – I have finally won something on the WAMO app!  I have won a very nice gold bracelet worth about £45, just by pinning my favourite image from the website associated with the challenge!  If you haven’t tried this fun little mobile app yet you really should download it and have a play – there are daily competitions to win lovely prizes!  Well, we are well into November now and it is starting to feel very festive at my house!  Presents all bought, wrapping paper acquired and husband is now in charge of creating the Christmas scenes in our daughters’ bedrooms and getting the rest of the house decorations in order.  It feels good that we are so well prepared and can now focus on the fun things that the season has to offer!

Now that competitions are coming thick and fast in preparation for the festive season and the Advents it is even more important to keep on top of our comping, so as not to go totally nuts or drown under the sheet weight of competitions.  One thing I think it is really important to do, especially at busy times of the year, is manually check for your wins!  Promoters, particularly on social media, aren’t always great at informing winners of their prizes, so sometimes we have to do some of the leg-work ourselves.  Here are my top tips for making sure you don’t miss any of your wins:

Facebook:

• Check Your Folders:  When promoters send a direct message to winners of a comp, because you aren’t “friends” with the promoter it won’t normally come through to your regular Inbox.  You need to make sure to check your “Other” folder regularly to make sure you don’t miss out on these winning messages.  I have even had messages in my “spam” folder on Facebook, which I always seem to forget about checking, so make sure you go in and check a few times a week.
• Notifications:  As well as your messages make sure to go through your notifications regularly, at least once a day.  Click “show all” when you click your notifications and scroll through to check to see if a promoter has mentioned you, you have been tagged by a friend in a win or if a promoter has replied to a comment you have replied to.
• Get Notified: If there are competitions that you are really keen on winning, or you want to make sure who has won then make sure to set up notifications on the promoter’s Facebook page.  Hover over the “Liked” button on the page, click notifications and check all the tick boxes.  Now when this promoter posts a status update, photo or anything else you will get notified via your Facebook notifications section.  That way you can check back through those competitions you have a keen interest in winning and see who actually won, even if you aren’t notified as the winner yourself.
• Join a Group:  There are lots of really friendly and supportive Facebook groups that you can join to help your chances of being tagged as a winner.  Join one, get involved so people start to know your name and tag friends in wins within the group as you see them too.  That way everyone is looking out for everyone else and we can all have a better chance of not missing out on lovely prizes.

Twitter:

• Search Your Name:  Make sure to search for your name regularly in the search box.  This will bring up all your tweets and may be time consuming, but it also reduces the risk of you missing a promoter’s tag or a comment with your name and no “@” symbol.
• Check Your Notifications:  As with facebook make sure and check your notifications sections at least once a day.  It is really easy to miss a notification of a reply to a competition for a promoter and no-one wants to miss out on wins!  Consider setting it up so you get an email message from Twitter every time you get a notification too, just as belt and braces!
• Get Notified:  Again as with Facebook you can set up Twitter to notify you every time a certain promoter tweets, just by going to their Twitter page clicking the cog to get into settings and turning on mobile notifications.  Now when they tweet you will get a push notification to your mobile device – this is also especially helpful if you are in a Twitter party and are out and about.  You will then hopefully be able to see when all prize winners are announced, even if you aren’t tagged in as a winner yourself.

General Tips:

• Google:  Make sure to Google your name regularly – at least once a week if not more often.  Use a search such as winner “your full name”, congratulations “your full name” and well done “your full name” and check for any mentions of your name (or Facebook or Twitter names if different), to check for wins you may have missed.
• Social Search:  Use Social Searcher.  This website allows you to search for social media wins that you might not be aware of.  I find the Google search function works best, use it like you would Google (as above) – again it might be time consuming, but it is worth trawling through on a regular basis just to check.  Also be aware that wins sometimes take a few days to show up on Social Searcher, so be patient and vigilant.
• Email Search:  If you have a ton of email, search for “winner”, “congratulations” or “well done” in your email programme.  This will doubtless throw up a lot of spam emails with these words in the title, but it helps to find the legitimate ones too.
• Email Spam & Junk:  Check your email spam & junk folders at least once a day.  We all get the usual spam associated with comping, including all those enticing ones that are entitled “congratulations” but that really relate to bingo sites, casinos and scams, but the odd winning one may have slipped through too, so be vigilant!

So let’s all be vigilant, organised and through when checking for our wins – it would be very sad to think that we were missing out on prizes because we didn’t spot an announcement or communication and that another winner has been drawn!  Get into some of these habits regularly and the chances of these all important winner announcements slipping through the net should be greatly reduced.

Happy comping and lots of Lucky Dust to you all!

Kirsty x