How To Run An Instagram Giveaway

Giveaways are one of the most effective growth hacks for increasing your Instagram following. But it needs to be done right so you can get the best results - AND there’s a way to make sure your following isn’t only limited to the Instagram platform. Wondering what that looks like? Let’s get into it. If you’d prefer to watch us break this all down rather than read, look no further. There are multiple ways to run contests on Instagram. We've experimented with them all, and this is by far the most effective process we've found.

1. Secure the prize

Obviously, the most important part of a contest is the actual prize that the lucky winner(s) will be taking home. Whether it's one of your own products, a collaborative contest with other brands, or something you've secured externally, ensure the prize is sought after enough, and on brand, that people will want to go out of their way to enter. Typically, the best option is to give away something that your business sells as this will likely result in more exposure via the winner posting the prize on their platforms. In addition, hopefully the winner would also spread the word about the quality of your offerings so their following which will in turn bring in new customers. If you give away something from another brand, it doesn't really help your company or interest in your brand grow.

2. Images

As always, ensure your images are high resolution. Preferably you'd always be taking original photos of the prize rather than simply using a generic photo or something you found online. Customizing the image will make it seem more genuine, as potential entrants will know that the prize is with you in person and for some reason that makes it feel more legit. We'd recommend not to slap text over the image if possible, as it can cheapen your feed (nothing more than a subtle "Giveaway!" or "Contest!" can work), but some sort of suggestion that it is in fact a giveaway is optimal.

3. Copy

The copy will need to grab the attention of your followers (and potential followers), breaking down why you're doing the giveaway (for example, to coincide with a holiday, to celebrate a new product launch, to celebrate a milestone or win, or just for the hell of it), all the instructions, any age or location restrictions, legal guidelines and any other pertinent information. We'd suggest using emojis and perhaps some CAPS to grab their attention, at least at the beginning of the post, and tag any relevant brands or partners, too.

4. Rules

This is the key part. The rules we've found to work the best for Instagram giveaways are:

- Like and Save this post (the SAVE is key)

- follow YOUR BRAND + ANY PARTNERS

- Tag x friends below who you'd share the prize with

- Bonus entries: Share to your Story, Send to a friend

All depending on the value of the prize, the above works smoothly every time. It's just the right number of requirements to not be a barrier to entry, and it's not too little that there's no value to you and any partners. Asking users to Save the post is super key as it's another additional engagement that helps the post rank in the algorithm. If you're interested in monitoring those who do it, the Story shares and Sends to friends are both additional fantastic engagements that help increase the reach of the post.If the prize itself is higher value, we have an alternative suggestion below.

5. Promote

The next step, of course, is promoting the contest. To maximize the value from your contest, we’d highly recommend to invest in the contest and use paid advertising to reach more people; share the contest to your Instagram Stories daily, with a clear CTA regarding what you’d like your followers to do to enter; create a Stories Highlight of all your contest posts so it’ll be easily accessible in your Instagram bio; post multiple times throughout the contest’s lifetime with different images in-feed to remind followers about the contest.Regarding the time limit, we’d suggest anywhere between 3 and 7 days. If you run a giveaway longer than a week, it tends to dip off via the algorithm not favouring your posts, and people also lose interest. 

6. Choose a Winner

Finally, you need to choose a winner. If you're so inclined, you could make a spreadsheet of all the handles of the entrants (including those who achieved bonus entries via sharing to Stories or sending to a friend) and use a random number picker. Alternatively, you could use an Instagram Random Comment Picker tool which will select one user from your comments by pasting the URL from the post into their system, and you can exclude multiple entries from the same person if you wish. This, however, won't take the additional entries via shares and sends into consideration.

Gleam.io

If your prize is of higher value, or if you'd prefer to grow multiple networks of either just your brand or your partners, we have an alternative. This isn't sponsored, but we recently discovered Gleam, a contesting service that allows you to run a contest via an external URL that you can promote via the link in your bio, and provide followers multiple ways to enter. These include:

- Follow on Instagram

- Like on Facebook

- Follow on Twitte

r- Subscribe on YouTube

- Watch a video on YouTube

We've found this service a fantastic way to bring a potential or existing Instagram follower across to all your platforms, enhancing the possibility that they'll stick around for longer and consume more of your content. Facebook and Instagram's collective APIs restrict automatically Liking or Following, instead they allow users to "Visit" your page, but generally people will understand that means you're after a Like or Follow.There are multiple plans, including a free tier that is quite bare bones but does the trick. It doesn't allow you to add any images or gather the emails of the entrants after the contest ends, but it allows you to select however many winners you'd like, it shows you potential invalid entries (to avoid doubling up or any test entries from yourself), there's fields to talk about the prizes, the rules, basically everything anyone would need to know. You can also add it as a tab on your Facebook Business page, which is handy. The paid tiers vary, but the smallest one allows you to capture emails and add images, which makes the contest look a ton more attractive.

Still needing more ways to run giveaways? Give us a shout, we'll help you out.