What is an Instagram Giveaway?
An Instagram giveaway is a limited-time promotion that allows you to offer something to your followers for free, in exchange for an Instagram like, comment, or other pre-determined requirement. For example, here is an Instagram giveaway that I recently entered by one of my favorite small businesses, Milkstain Apparel. The requirements to enter were to follow their Instagram account, tag three friends in the comments, repost their post to your story, and save their post. In exchange, they were giving away $500 in gift cards to their own store, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, Target, and Starbucks.
Instagram giveaways may look different depending on the business’s goals and the size of the brand, but when done correctly, a giveaway can help you establish your brand on Instagram, create a loyal following, and share your products/services with a larger audience. Now that we have a better understanding of what an Instagram giveaway is, let’s take a look at how to run one ourselves.
How to run an engaging Instagram giveaway:
HubSpot provides an informative blog post discussing 7 Tips for Running Engaging Instagram Giveaways, but for the sake of us all being beginners, we’re going to focus on 5 of these points to get us on the right track.
1. Choose the prize for your giveaway.
First things first, you’ll need to decide on a prize you are willing to give away during this promotion. This could be a product, service, or even an experience that will capture the attention of your target audience and make them want to complete the criteria needed to enter the contest. The prize will most likely depend on your goal. If you’re like Milkstain Apparel, hoping to reach a certain number of followers during your giveaway, you’ll want to choose a prize that will capture the attention of a wide variety of Instagram users, but if you want to spread awareness around a product launch, you’ll likely want to use that product as the contest prize.
2. Determine the entry-criteria for your contest.
In order to kickstart your Instagram giveaway, you’ll need to determine what it is you want your followers to do to be entered into the contest. This may also depend on your overall goal. If your goal is to spread brand awareness, you may ask each participant to share the post to their story and tag one of their friends, much like Milkstain Apparel. If your goal is to draw attention to another one of your platforms, you could ask that participants go to that platform to find the entry-criteria. The list goes on and on! Just make sure you consider your ultimate goal in determining entry-criteria for your giveaway.
3. Decide on a goal for your Instagram contest.
HubSpot says it the best, by determining a specific goal, you’re able to tailor your strategy more specifically and keep track of whether or not your giveaway was successful. In the caption of their original giveaway post, Milkstain Apparrel mentions that their goal was to reach 10k followers during the span of their giveaway. This gave them an easy way to determine the success of their contest, and by the looks of their Instagram profile now, they reached their goal!
4. Put a time-limit on your contest.
Another thing to keep in mind while launching an Instagram giveaway, is to make sure to set a deadline, or time-limit, for participants to enter. This will create a sense of urgency and make followers want to enter as soon as possible. A time-limit may also make users engage with your post more quickly, which will help your post stay at the top of your followers Instagram feeds.
5. Launch and promote your Instagram contest.
After considering what you want to giveaway as a prize, how you want participants to enter, what goal you wish to achieve, and how long you want your giveaway to be active for, you’re finally ready to launch and promote your post. Make sure to create an attractive image to capture the attention of your followers and a clear caption to ensure that they know exactly how to enter. It is also important to stay active on Instagram over the duration of your contest in order to answer any questions your participants may have. Lastly, make sure to promote the news of your giveaway on your other social media platforms to ensure that all of your followers are able to enter!
A couple other things to keep in mind:
Your followers are entering your contest, mostly because they want to win it. Make sure the winners are announced when and where you say they will be!
If you enjoyed this blog post, make sure to check out thesmmu.com for everything Social Media Marketing!
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