Searching High & Low For Your Wins

Hi everyone!  One of our lovely website members recently found a number of prizes she had won, but had not been informed about – fortunately all the promoters upheld the wins!  Had she not been vigilant in searching for wins regularly, she would probably have lost them!  I thought on that note that it was probably a good time to do a bit of a run down on the top tips for searching for missed wins!

In an ideal world competition promoters would always tag in a competition winner on facebook or twitter and send a direct email in other cases.  However, this isn’t always possible for promoters, and sometimes they just choose not to!  So where does that leave us?  Most of us do so many competitions that it is difficult to keep track of every one we do, especially the social media ones.  We can’t all visit the website or social media page of every competition promoter we enter with, just to check the winner of a comp.  With that in mind here are some ways you can search for those elusive wins!

Facebook:

• If a particular competition is really important to you – something you have your heart set on winning, or something from your Wish List – you can setup your Facebook to get notifications from the Facebook page of the promoter.  Go to their Facebook page, hover over “Liked” and tick the “Get notifications” option.  That way you will get a notification pop up whenever they post something new, which should hopefully flag up winning announcements. 
• Join some winning announcement groups (message me on Facebook for some recommendations, as most are secret and invitation only).  These groups are populated by like-minded compers who keep an eye out for people’s names and tag them in winning announcements, and share the announcements within the group, to make it easier for people to find their wins.  You can also search for your name within these groups, if you get behind with viewing the posts.
• Have an “Unlike spree” on Facebook.  Have a trawl through the “Unlike page for Facebook Compers” group (this is a closed group so you will need to request to join), where you can easily wheedle out Facebook pages where competitions have ended, thus freeing up your newsfeed a bit and making it easier to keep track of.
• Check your “other” messages box at least a few times a week (I do mine every day when I remember).  Messages from businesses and promoters often end up in here, rather than your regular message box where you would expect messages from people on your friends list.

 Twitter:

• Search for your name regularly in the search box – this will bring up all your tweets and any mentions from others.  It may be time-consuming, but it’s worth doing regularly. 

• Have some like-minded competition friends on your twitter list, to help keep an eye out for mentions you may have missed.

• Check your notification list regularly – sometimes they slip through without you getting the appropriate email or text.

• If you have your heart set on a prize, make sure to check back to the promoters Twitter page regularly, to check to see if they have announced the winner yet.  You can also set up notifications when they tweet by hovering over the cog next to their name and setting up mobile notifications.

General Tips:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Check your email spam 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!

Armed with these hints and tips, you can feel more confident that less wins are slipping through the net.  It might take some time to get into the habit of using all these tricks, but if you stay vigilant on do the on a regular basis, you should start to see better returns on your comping. 

Have you found missed wins this way?  Did the promoter honour the prize?  Do you use any other tricks and tips?  Let us know in the comments below, we would love to hear from you!

Happy comping, and lots of Lucky Dust to you all!

Kirsty x