Are you thinking of doing an Instagram Giveaway? and wondering what to expect from it. I will try to answer those questions in this post, along with data gathered by our website over the last year.
This guide will go in details of what a giveaway is, what is a good giveaway and what is a bad one, how to properly do a giveaway and how to get the most out of your promotional post.
Table of contents
- What is an Instagram Givaway?
- Shuld I do a giveaway?
- What is considered a good giveaway?
- How to do a proper high quality giveaway on Instagram.
- What is a bad giveaway and how to avoid it.
- Things to look out for and things to avoid.
What is an Instragram Giveaway?
Generally an Instagram Giveaway is a promotional piece of content by the owner of an instagram page to promote their own posts, website or video in an attempt to gain more followers.
Not all giveaways aim to gain followers and in some cases a giveaway is created to reward existing followers and to give back to the community, this is one of the best types of giveaways as there’s no expectation from the content creator, they are not looking for anything back in return.
Should I do a giveaway?
This is typically the question everyone asks, other questions that fit in this category are “When should I do a giveaway?” and “What should I give away?”
Let’s take it one step at a time.
Should you do a giveaway?
Short answer is: Of Course!
Long answer is: You should, if you know exactly what and who your target audiance is, a bit of research is needed to figure out what is required of you as a content creator and a giveaway host, things to figure out are
- Where are most of your followers from?
- What is it that you are giving away and how will they collect it?
- What is your budget?
- What is the duration of the giveaway?
- How will you pick a winner once the giveaway concludes?
DID YOU KNOW?
Giveaway can increase your follower count by 5% or more and many of those are converted to permanant followers if your content is relevent to the prize you are giving away!
When should I do a giveaway?
Giveaways happen for a number of reasons, from the data we gathered here at igrcp, common patterns are.
- Milestones (Hitting 10k followers, 50k, 100k, 1m, 10m)
- Events and Holidays (Valentines Day, Black Friday, Christmas and New Years, etc)
- Looking to grow (any time is a great time)
What should you give away?
This is the fun part, you can give anything away but it’s best to stay relavent to your content you are already creating and stay within your defined budget.
Some examples of good prizes:
If you are a gym owner, giving away a monthly membership is a great idea, or giving away quality sport gear.
If you make custom candles, give away few pieces of your highest grade candles to your followers, as this can also serve as a sample for your future customers.
If your page is not related to a product or brand, then you can give away Gift cards/Vouchers, Game Cards, iTune Cards, Hardware and Collectables.
What is considered a good giveaway?
A good giveaway is the one that feels rewarding to the users, that feels fair and that feels engaging, take some time and think of what your users would like to recieve, is it money? is it games? is it memberships to a websites? or a 1:1 zoom call.
Promote the giveaway on other social media websites like facebook or tik-tok to raise awarness of your giveaway.
Be available to respond and communicate with your followers, this boosts engagement and more followers will jump on to ask questions or interact with your content.
TIP:
With our website you can exclude yourself as a contestant, feel free to reply and engage with your audience.
Keep an eye on spam content and delete any comments that you deem unfit or toxic as this can ruin the hype and create problems.
How to do a proper high quality giveaway on Instagram.
A great giveaway is the one that has focus and a clear goal, the prize is not the focus here, it’s the intention. Think to the previews step of “what should I give away?” to get an idea of what you can give way as a prize, instead focus on what matters, what are you looking to get from this contest?
Are you looking to grow your followers?
Ask your followers to mention their friends, one or two is sufficiant, ask that new users follow you also as a requirment – you can verify this using our instagram comment picker, once a winner is selected by pressing the “Verify” button.
Are you looking to reward your followers?
Ask your followers to leave a nice comment, say something about your page/site/blog that they like/dislike and how to improve in the future, encourage engagement and using our comment picker tool, enable option to allow duplicate comments, this will give higher chance to people who are being active and engaging.
Are you looking to promote your website or blog?
Ask your followers to go to a website and write what they liked/disliked about the page/blog, was the design good, was the loading speed alright? what was their initial thought and how to improve it or if it’s a promo, mention that they did whatever they were asked to do, download and install a game or donate to a charity.
With the goal defined, start thinking of how to present this to your audiance – a great way is to make a video story anouncing the giveaway before hand, say you be creating a giveaway tomorrow and the prize will be revealed with the giveaway along with any other terms that the users should follow, this is to create a hype and get the users to come back to your page tomorrow to engage with the content.
Take a nice picture of the prize and in clear text mention that this is a giveaway post, outline all the rules in the body of the post and create a story letting all users know that the giveaway is live.
At the end of the giveaway, you can use our Random Comment Picker to load all the comments and pick a random winner! our website is screen recording ready, so take our your phone and record the giveaway live! this will insure that there was no monipulation done on your side and that the winner picked is the winner that is announced.
What is a bad giveaway? and what to avoid.
There is nothing worse than scams, spam and other toxic actions people do to gain quick followers.
- Don’t create giveaways if you are not going to go through it until the end.
- Don’t promise things you can’t deliver.
- Don’t ask followers for money or anything else in exchange for the prize.
- Don’t try to scan others for your own personal gain.
- Don’t ask for unrealistic tasks to be completed for a chance to win.
As a content creator, your job is to show your followers that you can be trusted, that you are patient and that they can count on you to deliver.
Avoid getting yourself in a corner by promising things like PlayStation 5 Giveaway! or things that are outside your budget when you don’t even have one yet, this will just make you look bad and your followers will start leaving.
Be honest with your users and be honest with yourself.
Things to look out for and things to avoid.
Let’s be honest, people like free things, people like to gain an unfair advantage and people will try things, so to protect your self, you need to be aware of these things.
- Keep an eye on your post for any fishy activity such as spam or toxic comments and delete them right away.
- You might see followers leaving after a giveaway is done, this is normal as many people will follow just for a chance to win and once it’s over, they’ll leave, but that’s fine, you will still walk away with a lot of permanent followers, on average giveaways increase follower count by about 5-10% and 3-5% remain as permanent, so don’t be alarm’d by this!
- You might have to cover additional expenses by doing a giveaway, things like paying for a service to load all the comments or paying shipping fees, this is all part of the giveaway, make sure you account for that in your budget.