Win contact lenses every week!

GetLenses  already supply contact lenses far more cheaply than high street opticians - but by winning your lenses from them, you could get them absolutely FREE!

Every week, they run a competition on Twitter where just by retweeting a message, you could win a month's supply of lenses. Find them at @getlenses where you will usually find the competition tweet posted on a Thursday and the winner announced on Friday.

They also run occasional competitions on their Facebook page where they also  post reminders about the weekly Twitter competition, just in case your Twitter timeline moves so fast you miss their announcement there.

Too hot? Win a chance to cool down!

I'm sure everyone enjoyed the beautiful weather at the weekend. (What went wrong? Doesn't the weather know it usually turns  nasty at the weekend when we have time to enjoy it?) But winter sports  fans  may well be already pining for the snow. So how about winning  a year's membership to the Snow Centre in Hemel Hempstead, along with a private lesson in ski or snowboarding to get you going?

Entering couldn't be easier, as long as you have a Twitter account. All you need to do is Tweet

Win an annual membership and a private lesson with @the_snowcentre Retweet this message before midnight Sat 16th April http://bit.ly/fsXQFp

To make it even simpler, you  can send your tweet just by clicking on the "Enter" button at http://www.thesnowcentre.com/page/72 where  you can read more about the competition and the Snow Centre.

The competition  closes at 11.59pm on April 17th, so get your tweet in Now!

Free Craft Stamper e-zine

As most of you  know, I love crafting as much as I love comping, and often buy Craft Stamper  magazine. They have put together a free e-zine featuring 12 of their top projects from last year. And the e-zine even contains a competition for £200 of crafting goodies, closing 30 Sep. I know a lot of compers are also crafters - it must be something to do with all those home made postcards we send - and the gorgeous  selection of goodies they are giving away would give somebody new to crafting a great start or provide masses of new inspiration to a more experienced crafter.


To get hold of your own free copy of the e-zine, visit www.craftstamper.com/ezine and do let me know what your favourite project in it is! My own favourite is called "On Reflection" using beautiful  stamps  from Lavinia Stamps. Their stand is always my first port of  call when I  visit a craft show.

Comping's Wizard in Oz!

Grape Vine readers  may have noticed that some of the winning tiebreakers listed in this month's issue were for Australian competitions. Comping seems to be extremely popular in Australia at the moment. A friend who is  just back from a business trip picked up all these forms in a single visit to Woolworths (ah, Woolworths - how many of you gave a nostalgic sigh?) He said there were more competitions - these are just  a sample of what was on offer in ONE shop.

The  forms are a  mixture of tiebreakers, text comps and draws. How lovely, to have so many to choose from!

Some more Twitter Tips

I know that lots of you have read and used my previousTwitter tips, but still have questions about using Twitter and entering Twitter comps, so based on the questions I've been asked over the last few weeks here are some more tips - I hope you find them helpful.

Favouriting Tweets

Have you ever had a tweet to say you have won a prize, then not been able to find the tweet again if, for instance, you want to thank the sender for the prize or, unfortunately, tell them it hasn't turned up? If you have the tweet stored in your favourites, you can find it quite simply by clicking on "Favourites" onyour Twitter home page.

To make a tweet into a favourite, just click on Favourite underneath the message. An orange triangle will appear on the top left and the message will be listed in your favourites. I put winning tweets into my favourites until the prize arrives: I then reply to the tweet to thank the sender and then click on "unfavourite" at the bottom of the message and it vanishes from my list. This is a great way of keeping track of whenther you are still  waiting for any prizes.

You can also favourite tweets for competitions that allow you more than one entry, but if you want to retweet them  again you will have to copy and paste them manually as Twitter will only let you retweet a message once. And that leads me on to.....

Copying and pasting tweets for Retweet competitions

A quick reminder that if you copy and paste a tweet instead of using the retweet function, you MUST start your tweet with RT @ and  the name of the original tweeter. If their name isn't in the tweet, they won't see your message, so however oftenyou tweet it you won't be entered  into the competition.   And what's more, other people may think that it is YOU who is running the competition and start retweeting your message.

If your entry is retweeted by another comper

all you need to do is find the tweet they retweeted and delete it. When a tweet is deleted, all retweets of it vanish. So you can cancel your tweet  to remove any retweets of it, and then tweet your entry again and hope it isn't retweeted a second time.

Shortening links

Sometimes you are asked to send a link, for instance to your favourite product on a website, but the link is far too long for Twitter's 140 characters. If you use Tweet Deck, it has a handy built in link shortener but if you  need to shorten it yourself, you can just paste the link into http://bit.ly/ and it will shorten it for you. Another link shortener is http://tinyurl.com/

"Tweet Deck moves too fast for  me!"

 If Tweet deck makes you feel seasick, click on the little spanner on the topright and then select "Twitter" and  untick "Enable real time streaming". Then you will be able to  read at your own pace and not be chasing tweets up and down your timeline!

Some new competitions for you

Appliances online are offering a  prize of £200 worth of vouchers for a supermarket of your choice. To enter, go to http://www.appliancesonline.co.uk/  and follow the link to the competition on the right. The task is to tell them about your most memorable cooking catastrophe, and you can read some of the entries they have already received if you scroll down below  the entry form. I can really feel the pain of some of those entrants!  The winner will be the story with the most literary and creative merit. Closing 03 May.

Bio-Synergy Performance products have a trip to Rio to be won, with 2 x driving experience days, 20 x Fast and Furious merchandise packs and Bio-Synergy goodies and  20 x  fast and  Furious box sets for runners up. To enter, go to http://www.bio-synergy.co.uk/ . First of all click on the “Products” heading and note down any two of the items on the page (there are too many, and with too long names, to list here) then go back to the home page and wait for the competition to appear in the main window  and follow the link to it. The first two answers will be  the two items you have noted down, the third answer is Rio de Janeiro Closing 31 Jul.

Grape Vine readers will already have their April magazine (contact me if it's not arrived yet!) but here are a couple that I found after it went to the printers, yet close too soon to be included in the April update.


Sainsburys have 50 prizes of a "Romantic night in" consisting of a year's subscription to Love Film, a blu-ray DVD player, a jar of Nescafé Gold Blend and a box of  Dairy Box on offer. Enter by swiping your Nectar card when buying any pack of Nescafé Gold Blend or Black Gold at Sainsburys between 23 Mar (so you might have already entered without knowing it!) and 19 Apr.

Morrisons and Lucozade  are giving away a trip for 2 to Los Angeles to learn how to roller skate. Before you enter, you must buy a 4 x 500ml pack of Lucozade Sport (orange or Lemon & lime) from Morrisons and hang on to your receipt - you will have to produce it if you win. Then text (normal rate)  ORANGE followed by the last 4 digits of your bar code to 80878. One entry per mobile per day, so as there is only one prize there's nothing to stop you entering every day once you have your receipt. Closing 17 Apr.

And now, simply because I don't have any photos to go with today's blog and it's  looking a little dull around here, here is a completely irrelevant photo of a  family of coatis.

How Can I Tell If I've Won a Competition on Facebook?

How can I tell if I have won a competition on Facebook? This question crops up over and over again and is extremely  hard to answer as it varies from competition to competition.

The rules for running competitions on Facebook are quite complicated  - you can see them here http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php but most of  the people running competitions don't know that these rules exist! A competition has to be run through an application that collects your email address, and winners must be notified by email.

But how often does that happen? Probably with about 1 in 100 Facebook competitions. Many small businesses run  competitions on their pages, and even if they knew about these rules, they would not be able to afford to pay for an application or have the technical skills to install one. So, since we compers want lots of lovely competitions to enter, we carry on liking statuses, tagging photos, posting links on our walls and commenting on statuses, even though all these things are theoretically banned.

But without a winning email,  it can be very difficult to know when we have won. Sometimes a page owner will send you a message but it doesn't always seem to be possible for them to do it. The less secure your profile, the more likely they are to be able to. The least secure setting, and the one that means they are most likely to contact you by message, is to go into your account (top right hand side) and select "Privacy Settings" then choose "Everyone". Only do this if you keep NO detailed personal information, such as your address or phone number, in your profile.

Even if you do this, Facebook sometimes won't let a page, rather than an individual, message you, so somebody from a page where you have won a prize may send you a friend request so that they can message you personally. For this reason it is a  good idea to NOT automatically turn down friend requests from complete strangers, as they may be from a business trying to let you know that you have won a prize. If you accept the request and they turn out not to be, it is easy enough to click "unfriend" at a later date.

However much of the time, winners names are just posted in an update on the page and the winners are expected to get in touch. If you miss the update, you could miss out on the prize. I think most page owners think that all their followers visit every page they follow on a regular basis, but with some compers following hundreds or even thousands of pages there just aren't enough hours in the day for that! So you need to have some tricks for helping yourself to spot mentions of your name.

The first thing to do is to make sure you can see every update of every page on your own home page. Facebook's default setting is to only show the  ones you interact with most often. To make sure Facebook shows you ALL updates, go to your home page and scroll right down to the bottom. This might take longer than you think, as  Facebook keeps moving the bottom! But eventually it will stop  and  there will be a bar at the bottom of the page, saying "Older posts" on  the left and "Edit options" on the right. Click on Edit Options and a box will appear - make sure that in the box next to "Allow posts from" you have selected "All of your friends and pages".

That way, if you make a note of the time when you finish a session on Facebook, in  theory you can scroll right back to that time the next time you log on and read every single message that has been posted since, to see if your name crops up. And you can search the page by hitting the Ctrl and F keys at the same time and typing your name into the search box, to see if anybody has mentioned you.

 Another  way you can search Facebook is to type your own name into the search box at the top of the page. A list of all the people with the same name as you will appear, but at the bottom of this is "See more results  for....". Click on this and under the list of people, you will see "Posts by friends", and on the left, "Posts by everyone", both of which are worth checking. Unfortunately most posts on pages won't show up, but if any of your friends has shared a winners list and your name is on it, you will see it.

Friends.... now they are probably the most important way of finding out about wins on Facebook! Different people are online at different times of day, and visit different pages in a different order. So one of the best ways of finding out if you have won a prize on Facebook is to cultivate as large a circle of comping friends as possible and agree with each other that if any of you spots one of the others listed as  a winner, you will post a link to the announcement on the winner's wall.

And if you haven't yet got any comping friends on Facebook to share the task with, do feel free to send ME a friend request! http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Jane-Willis/626309883