One of the best ways to generate engagement for your Instagram profile is to host an Instagram giveaway.
This is going to create a feeling of excitement, and help you gain Instagram followers, because people love the idea of being able to get something for free, but they also love the idea of being able to win something.
This means that an Instagram giveaway is a great strategy for increasing our engagement, while also promoting a good feeling amongst your audience.
What Consists of an Instagram Giveaway?
An Instagram giveaway is a promotion that is run by a business that would like to drive more interactions and engagement to their platform and increase their Instagram followers.
They run it for a limited amount of time, and during that time, the business will ask participants to take specific actions in order to be in the giveaway.
This could be producing user-generated content, tagging a friend, signing up for an email list, or even reposting content.
Why Run a Giveaway on Instagram?
One of the reasons why we think that you should try running a giveaway on Instagram is to expand your reach and potentially generate more followers for your profile.
In fact, profiles that run Instagram giveaways can increase their following 70% quicker over three months than profiles that don’t.
As we will talk about in a moment, many giveaways include some kind of post sharing or tagging that is going to put your brand name in front of more of your audience.
This is an excellent strategy if you are trying to get more followers because people trust the things that their friends are interested in.
When a friend tags you in an Instagram post, there is a chance that you are going to go and check out their profile without thinking twice.
Another excellent reason to execute an Instagram giveaway is to increase your engagement.
Perhaps your posts haven’t been doing as well as you had hoped over the last few weeks or so, and your followers haven’t been interacting with them as much.
When it comes to a giveaway, the content that you post around the giveaway is going to get a lot of comments.
This means that your Instagram giveaway is a great way to put some of their engagement back on your page by asking for shares, comments, likes, or whatever other tactic that you would like to apply.
Instagram giveaways are also a great way to build rapport with your audience. People love the opportunity to be able to win something, and you can create a real opportunity here.
Depending on the kind of giveaway that you have chosen you can establish yourself as a real authority in your industry.
How to Conduct an Instagram Giveaway
Are you ready to take the plunge and try an Instagram giveaway? Before you start, take note of the next few steps, and make sure that you are complying with Instagram’s rules for giveaways.
1. Establish Your Goals
The first step here is to go back to the drawing board and work out the goals that you have for your Instagram giveaway.
Perhaps you want to increase your followers or boost your sales with your giveaway. Setting specific goals for your giveaway is helpful to manage your expectations around it.
2. Choose the Prize
What are your Instagram followers going to get if they win your giveaway? The good news is that the sky is the limit.
If you want to increase your followers, you could give away a gift card to somewhere, but if you’re driving brand awareness, then you might want to give away one of your products.
If you’re trying to promote the exclusivity of your business, then you might want to offer a prize pack that includes some limited-edition items.
If you want something a little bit more substantial, you could give away a special experience, a trip, or a tour of your brand’s warehouse.
3. Work Out How Users Can Enter the Giveaway
The next step in the process is working out what your criteria is going to be for your giveaway. If you want to increase your followers, you might want to ask participants to tag a friend, or like your post.
However, if you want to drive people to your website, or you want to add them to your email list, then ask them to comment on your post and follow the instructions that you have left on their post to sign up on your website.
4. Use Hashtags
If you want to increase the reach of your giveaway on Instagram, you’ve got to use the best hashtags for it.
Use generic hashtags for your giveaway, but also try to find some brand specific hashtags as well.
You could even think about using a hashtag that includes your industry, or you might want to describe what you are giving away in your hashtags.
Whatever you come up with, make sure that it is relevant to your industry, and make sure that it is relevant to your giveaway and the specifics of it.
5. Come up with a Time Limit
When you are hosting a giveaway on Instagram, it’s important to place a timeline on it.
We have all felt the urgency of a 24-hour sale, so setting a time limit is going to create a sense of urgency around your giveaway and increase excitement among your participants.
Feel free to pick any time limit but try not to let it drag on for longer than a week. The contest is going to become stale after this, and you will see your engagement reduce.
6. Start Your Giveaway and Follow Through on it
Now, all that is left to do is to plan a coordinated launched for your Instagram giveaway.
Try to cross-promote it on your blog, emails, and other social networks. Also, make sure that you are aware of the timing of your giveaway.
What time does your Instagram feed see the most engagement? This is when you want to launch your giveaway. Of course, the last step of the Instagram giveaway is to choose the winner.
If you want to avoid being accused of fraud or favoritism, make sure that you choose the winner randomly. There are a number of apps and tools that can help you with this.
Instagram Giveaway Ideas
Now that you have established how to host a giveaway, you’re probably wondering what kind of giveaway you should run.
The reality is, there is no one correct answer. This is why we have put together nine ideas for Instagram giveaways, so that you can find inspiration through them. Let’s take a look.
1. Collaborate with Celebs
Working with Instagram influencers is a good way to increase your presence on Instagram in general, and a celebrity or influencer can expand your reach and expose your brand to hundreds, if not thousands of potential followers.
Because it’s being recommended by someone outside of your brand, this is going to increase the authenticity of your giveaway, instead of feeling like your brand its only self-serving.
Working with celebrities and influencers on Instagram can be difficult though, which is why partnering with an agency can often be a better approach.
2. Tag a Friend
As we mentioned earlier, giveaways on Instagram are great for increasing reach. Almost every contest is going to have an element of tagging a friend, although you don’t have to use this strategy.
However, it is a great way to reach more profiles, and profiles that are very targeted and highly likely to follow you. After all, the friends of the people that already follow you are highly likely to want to follow you as well.
When you request that they tag a friend, you are giving them the chance to share something that they really like with their friends.
Interestingly, some people don’t even think about sharing something unless they have been asked to.
3. Have a Selfie Contest
Hosting a selfie contest is a great way to engage your followers even further.
Here, you’re not just asking them to react to your post, but you are asking them to take it a step further and actually come up with their own content and response.
Asking your users to post a selfie is going to increase your reach a lot more than if you just ask them to tag somebody.
This way, you are not limited to who they tag, and your brand is connecting with all of the Instagram followers that are going to see their posts as well.
As a bonus, this kind of Instagram giveaway is going to result in user-generated content that you can incorporate into your strategy.
4. Contest: Caption This Photo
This Instagram giveaway idea is a lot of fun. Have you ever been taking photos for your brand, or looking through old images, and found something that is just a little bit too strange to post online?
Maybe somebody is making a weird face, or there are too many people in the photo. This kind of contest is a great way to use these photos and have fun with your community at the same time.
For a giveaway like this, you will upload your funny photo, and ask your audience to create their best captions and leave them in the comments.
This is going to increase your engagement, and some people will even tag their friends to participate as well.
5. Follow and Tag
This is a super traditional approach to giveaways, but it’s traditional because it works. Typically, follow and tag is going to occur during business partnerships, or when you are asking your followers to follow another profile and then tag their friends.
This is going to be effective for expanding or following, especially if you find the right influencer or brand that resonates well with your followers on Instagram.
Choosing who to collaborate with is going to be the most important aspect of this, because you want to make sure that it’s really good for your general Instagram goals.
Because you are both going to be promoting one another, you want to be true to the platform that you have already built.
6. To Win Giveaway Like and Share
We love it when Instagram giveaways get really creative. The next approach is generating engagement which is one step further than simply asking your audience to leave a comment on your post.
Now, you are asking them to share your giveaway post with their community as well.
Because your post is going to get shared with an Instagram story, you will have a good chance of putting it in front of the right people.
Because 500 million users look at Instagram stories every day you are going to want to make sure that your giveaway makes it into stories.
If you choose this giveaway concept, you’ll want to spend a little bit of extra time designing an image or graphic for your post.
Make sure that your image is compelling enough for them to want to check out what’s going on with the giveaway.
7. Scheduled Instagram Giveaways
Scheduling your giveaways can be a great Instagram giveaway idea, depending on how you go about them.
For example, if you are executing your Instagram giveaway in December, you might want to come up with a giveaway around the 12 days of Christmas.
This way, your followers know what to expect, and they know that more is coming. A lot of the time, this kind of giveaway is going to lead up to a big prize on the last day.
8. Challenge Contest
Come up with some kind of challenge or feat for your Instagram followers to accomplish so that they can be entered into the giveaway.
This could be as easy as finishing the lyrics of a song, or as difficult as completing a treasure hunt that you leave clues for in your last four posts.
Though these kinds of giveaways can be lots of fun, they can also often involve a lot of work, both on your end, and on the end of your followers.
When you are planning a giveaway, make sure that you think about this, and think about your audience’s participation.
You don’t want it to be so challenging that they don’t want to be a part of it. If you are giving away a pretty good-sized prize, then it could be worth it, otherwise you will want to keep it simple.
9. Follow and Share Giveaway
Last but not least is the most common giveaway on Instagram, and this is the follow and share giveaway.
You are going to ask participants to do exactly this: make sure that they are following you, and make sure that they share your post to their Instagram stories.
Again, this is a great way to reach more people, and encourage them to follow you.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it, what we think are the eight best creative Instagram giveaway ideas. When you are thinking about your next giveaway, you need to think about what your goals are for your giveaway first.
As you can see, some of these concepts are geared more towards engagement, while others are geared towards more increasing that follower list.
The best way to make sure that your Instagram giveaway is worthwhile is to have a clear vision for what you want to get out of it.
Here at Growthoid, we love sharing new ideas with our clients on how they can grow their Instagram profiles. Good luck!
