Instagram is a platform that can easily promote your personal blog or your business. It has more than 1 billion active users, and you have to make something very interesting to attract their attention.
Today, we’ll be taking a look at how you can use giveaways on Instagram to grow your followers, how to build your fanbase or reach new potential customers. We’ll go over four fundamental ways you’ll need to consider when you launching a giveaway, we will see real-world examples of how these strategies can impact your followers growth, and discuss some cautionary guidelines on pitfalls to avoid. We will present you 4 giveaway methods and then we will discuss all subtleties and features of such a promotion.
Set your goal:
In any promotion, you have to remember about efficiency. If you don’t measure efficiency, you won’t understand if your giveaway is successful.
Primary giveaway reasons:
- To grow your Instagram followers ( before giveaway set a needed number of followers, 500 for example)
- Increase the number of profile references in Instagram
- Rise recognition (brand, blogger)
- Grow involvement to your account
Ideally, a good Instagram giveaway should accomplish both of these goals. A highly shareable post will drive social shares by itself, which leads to a greater exposure and impression share.
The main idea of a giveaway is sharing. It means good Instagram giveaway should accomplish all of these goals.
Choose a present:
Always keep in mind, that there are a lot of “gift catchers” who just want to win an interesting present. So don’t set presents that are interesting to everybody. Such as tickets to the movie, dinner at the restaurant, iPhone, etc. Such presents are going to attract many people, but you won’t get any profit for your account in the end. You need to decide on a suitable prize for the lucky entrant(s) to win. Always choose a present that is interesting exactly to your followers.
Choosing a suitable prize is a balancing act. You need to make sure people have enough incentive to enter your giveaway by offering something sufficiently attractive, but without taking a serious loss on the product you choose to give away. For example, you have bike rental, a good present is rental hours, but not a bicycle or its accessories. It can be interesting for tourists or people who have no bicycle but want to ride and see the neighborhood.
Otherwise, your giveaway will attract the audience who want their own bicycle. Therefore, when you select a gift, it is important to determine who you want to attract.
What do I have to do if I promote a mass product?
In that case, just change your goal from gathering the followers to recognizability. In any way, you will get followers because of the entry criteria for your giveaway.
I have no product, I’m a blogger. What do I have to do?
I bet you have a thematic blog. For example, you are a travel-blogger, as a present in your giveaway you can offer a day travel card in any country.
Maybe you are a beauty-blogger? Makeup products are excellent as a present. Maybe you know a lot about marketing? Present a modern book about it. Don’t choose a present just for a present.
Most popular mechanics for a giveaway.
There are 4 main mechanics. All of them begin with an announcement post, where you explain all rules:
- What present do you offer?
- What are the terms?
- How long does your giveaway last?
- The day of the results.
Let’s talk more about second point.
Mechanic “Tag a friend”.
Audience needs to:
- Follow your page
- Like your giveaway post
- Tag a friend in comments
- Wait for results
Always allow your audience to leave as many comments as they want. Because as many friends they tag, as more people will see your profile. It means your profile will faster go to the top.
Use tip, ask your audience write a little info about giveaway, to make it simpler for tagged friends.
Use this mechanic if you want to promote your personal blog.
Mechanic “Creative giveaway”
Thousands of users try to show their creativity in Instagram every day, so let them show their creative and win a present.
Usually terms of creative giveaway look like this:
- Follow the account
- Make a creative task and post in it your account
- Tag a giveaway profile
- Wait for results
Mechanic “Picture repost”
This is an anti-mechanic, but sometimes you can still meet it.
It works very easy, you have to post a giveaway picture and ask your audience to repost it.
This mechanic is less productive because many people still don’t know how to repost pictures.
Now we all trying to make our Instagram feed very beautiful, this picture repost can damage all the beauty of your profile.
And the last reason why you have to avoid this mechanic because Instagram blocks multiple posting of the same photo. It means that your account can be blocked.
Better not use this mechanic at all.
If your goal is to be in the audience’s feed, just use stories.
Mechanic “Stories giveaway”
To attend this giveaway the audience need to:
- Follow your account
- Screen shot your post
- Post it in Stories and tag a friend or your account in it
Your account is not so popular now, so you can easily count all giveaway members, that have mentioned you in their stories in your direct messages.
You can manually count all of them and then use random number generator to find who has won this giveaway.
Publish the result in stories and tag a winner.
Because of the stories a lot of users will know about your giveaway. But don’t forget that stories live 24 hours.
Few tips for better giveaways:
- Don’t make your giveaway very long. One week is more than enough. There are so many giveaways now on Instagram, nobody wants to wait a month until you finish it.
- Make simple rules, be honest with our audience.
How to choose a winner of your Instagram giveaway?
Little tips how to run giveaway perfectly:
- Create the perfect Instagram giveaway post
- Create ‘reminder’ posts to share throughout your Instagram giveaway
- Tally the results of your Instagram giveaway
- Spread the news about the winner of your Instagram giveaway
Think in advance how you will choose the winner, and be sure to consider all the details during the organization or write about it in a reminder post. Otherwise, you can make mistakes that will suppose resentment of participants and adversely affect your reputation. For example, if you will miss several participants, the audience will notice it.
Usually, people use random number generator, but before it, you have to understand how many people have attended your giveaway.
If you make a creative giveaway with unique hashtag Instagram will show you the exact number of people itself.
But if your giveaway condition was to tag someone in comments, you need to count all of them. Not to make mistakes use service that will help you to export all data you need for your giveaway from Instagram.
You can use Export Ninja. It will export all data in Google Sheets or Excel in chronological order. Then put the number of comments into random number generator and make happy one of users.
Where to find an audience?
For the beginning ask your friends to attend your giveaway, ask them to mention their friends. If you have enough budget you can collaborate with famous bloggers, it always works well.
Will people unsubscribe?
You have to be ready that people will unfollow you after giveaway. The percentage of unfollowing is difficult to predict, as it is influenced by a large number of factors: from the choice of the present to the quality of the posts that you published during the competition.
If you have an interesting and beautiful blog, your feed is nice to look through, and people read your posts with pleasure, then the percentage of unsubscribing will be about 20-30% of all incoming people.
How to minimize the percentage of unfollow?
Here is a few tips to keep your subscribers:
- During the giveaway, be an active Instagram user. Make a content plan with useful posts in advance. Remember that many of them know nothing about you, just show them how cool you are.
- Communicate with the audience in comments, respond to stories – this will help you to significantly reduce the percentage of unsubscribe.
The result and life after giveaway.
When everything is done just check:
- Have you reached your goal? If not, what went wrong?
- What percentage of the new audience has unsubscribed from you after giveaway? If more than 30%, what went wrong?
- Has the activity of subscribers increased after the contest? If not, why?
Answers to these questions will help you find mistakes that you can avoid in your next giveaway. Or confirm that you did everything right.
