Ask HN: How to Promote a Competition?

Hi HN,

At heart, we’re a group of designers and engineers. Together we're Mobile Jazz, a devshop for mobile apps and websites. We have a product called Bugfender, a tool to help developers remotely debug their mobile apps. We think it’s great, but we always struggle when it comes to marketing, despite knowing exactly who our audience are.

To help encourage new users we’re planning a giveaway, and I’m here today to ask for your advice or tips and tricks on how to promote it.

The competition is for a new mobile device. Without going into the technical details of using Bugfender, the rules are simple:

1) You must be a new user and sign up 2) You must start using the product (sending logs from your application to our servers)

Naturally, we want to spread the word. So we’ve come up with a few ideas to help promote it:

• Created a dedicated landing page • Written a blog post announcement • Written other blog posts where we are able to mention the competition • Create images and banners to promote on social

But we know there must be more ways to promote it - so I’m here to ask for help!

1) Has anyone ran a successful competition? What went well? 2) Has anyone ran an unsuccessful competition? Want went wrong? 3) Do you have any tips or ideas on how to promote a giveaway? 4) How can we encourage sharing? People won’t likely want to share this, as the more entries the less their chance. 5) What duration should we run the competition for? We need to find a good balance between a sense of urgency and also enough time for us to get sufficient sign ups. 6) Giveaway directories - do developer focused ones exist? Would it be beneficial publishing it there? Any recommendations? 7) Aside from Twitter and Facebook, are there any other social networks worth posting this on? Does anyone use Google +?

Any help or ideas you can share would be greatly appreciated. Let me know if you have any questions.

Many thanks,

Adam