Are Instagram Giveaways Still a Relevant Strategy to Grow Followers?
I have to be honest: I have a love and hate relationship with Instagram giveaways!
Giveaways can be a great way to add value and grow your audience. But most people are creating giveaways JUST to grow and forgetting the user experience.
Those do more harm than good.
They become spammy and people who see it in an account they love or get tagged by a friend, get annoyed and may even unfollow your Instagram account.
Especially when part of the rules are to tag many friends for extra entries.
But they can also be super exciting and fruitful!
When I launched my Canva template subscription, Your Template Club, I decided to create a separate Instagram account for that business.
So there I was, a month before launching that product and a brand new Instagram account with no one to buy it from me.
I decided to use my main account @yoursocialteam, which already has a established audience, to host a giveaway and start building up hype for the launch, as well as bringing those in my followers list who were interested in this other product and topic (a Canva template subscription) from the new account, to follow it too.
The prize: a year long subscription of Your Template Club. Plus they would be the first person to get in (exclusivity matters!).
It was a total hit. I gained over 1k followers for the new account in one day.
And while I was lucky to have another Instagram account with a large followers list to start from, if you don’t, you can easily do that by paying an influencer or brand partner to host it in their Instagram account and have the same results.
So how do I create a giveaway on Instagram that does not annoy my followers and helps me grow?
Part of the trick here is frequency. If you’re a brand, save giveaways for a couple of times a year. If you’re an influencer, it’s more accepted that you partner with brands for giveaways and your audience may enjoy those more, if they are well curated and exciting prizes.
Here are some of our Pro Tips to still use giveaways on Instagram to grow your brand today:
Do not have them too often. How often is up to you, but I would not have more than 1 per quarter.
Make them worth your while. Since you shouldn’t host Instagram giveaways too often, when you do, it is worth investing in a partnership with an influencer who has an audience that is your potential customer or client, so you make sure you will get results.
Really curate your prize. It needs to make sense for you to give it and for your specific target audience to want it --forget cash cards and iPhones, they will just attract a random audience that doesn't care about your business.
Do not to partner with more than one other account. Asking for people to follow 27 other accounts to enter is no one's idea of a good time! You don't want to sound spammy.
Use simple and clear instructions on how to enter. We have several captions templates for giveaways that give clear instructions to your audience in our 125 Caption for Instagram Templates.
Pick your winner honestly and randomly. Picking an influencer with a big account every time is very obvious and dishonest and will piss off your audience.
Make it short. I like making my giveaways last 2 days.Having it last too long make people forget they even entered.
Do not forget to pick a winner and announce it in the comments of the post + stories and DM the winner. I also like editing the original caption saying ***CLOSED***.
So if you choose to host giveaways, follow these pro tips not to alienate your audience and not be pushy in your execution.
Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and content shop to help social media managers and Instagram savvy women entrepreneurs to beat the algorithm and grow their organic engagement (yes, even in 2021). This year she also launched Your Template Club, a Canva Template subscription to provide social media managers and Instagram savvy business owners with content template designed for engagement in their inbox.
Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2017, Manu started Your Social Team with the mission of helping women entrepreneur and social media managers grow engagement and sales through Instagram without the overwhelm.