The Tea: Instagram Giveaways
Once a quirky way to engage followers, now the mid-tier influencer’s bread-and-butter, giveaways have become a cornerstone of Instagram content. Even the Kardashians, the most followed people on the platform, can’t resist the engagement powerhouse.
Given the prevalence and popularity of contest content, we decided to explore the best practices and winning strategies for Instagram giveaways. Here’s what we learned from our research and experimentation.
Know Your Goals
The first step of any successful Instagram giveaway is to have a clear goal in mind. For us, the goal was education: we wanted to understand how giveaways work for small businesses with a low following. But here are some more conventional intentions for running an Instagram giveaway:
Increase following — Tailwind shares, “an Instagram contest or giveaway can help you grow your followers 70% faster in three months.”
Lead generation — In 2015, Small Biz Trends reported contests saw the highest conversion rates of all surveyed forms. The same is true for social media — giveaways are an excellent way to move followers up the marketing funnel.
Build brand awareness, or expose a brand/product to a new audience — According to Outgrow, “33% of contest participants are open to receiving information about the brand and partners.”
Boost engagement — “Instagram contests get 3.5 times as many likes and 64 times more comments on average than regular posts.” – Tailwind
Encourage user-generated content (UGC) — Stackla reports, “consumers find UGC 9.8x more impactful than influencer content.”
Choose the Right Giveaway Type
Once you have a goal for your giveaway in mind, you have to choose an appropriate format to facilitate said giveaway.
Here are the 8 major types of Instagram giveaways:
Like and/or comment — The simplest (but often most effective) way to encourage a high volume of giveaway entries is to ask users to like or comment on a feed post. Just keep in mind that if you’re looking to get meaningful engagement or lead generation from your giveaway, the ease of entry can attract lower-quality leads.
Follow — If your goal is to gain more followers or expose users to a product/brand, instruct participants to follow certain accounts to qualify for entry. This is an especially effective method when collaborating on giveaways with other brands (and one we used in our giveaway experiment).
Tag-a-friend — Another way to gain followers, or gain exposure to a new audience, is the tag-a-friend format. Bonus points if you combine comment/like and tag-a-friend.
Photo caption — Got great photos? Frame your giveaway as a caption contest. Not only does this method encourage thoughtful response, it adds a democratic element to the selection process (most liked comment wins).
Trivia contest — As with the photo caption contest, trivia contests are a great way to invite quality engagement and encourage conversation in the comments.
User-generated content — Looking for compelling testimonials or passionate product reviews? Center a giveaway around user-generated content. For example, a purveyor of fine bird feeders might encourage followers to share a photo of their bird feeder in action for a chance to win a matching birdbath. Not only does this approach net high-quality entries, it also generates a wealth of user-generated content to use in future campaigns. Just make sure your repost intentions are made clear in the contest caption.
Scavenger hunt — A smart choice for product-centered giveaways, the scavenger hunt contest bridges the gap between social media and the real world by encouraging participants to find some brand-aligned motif in the wild and then share a photo of that motif on Instagram. Though decidedly the most labor-intensive format for a giveaway, scavenger hunts result in quality engagement, user-generated content, increased following — and most importantly, generate buzz on social media and beyond.
Instagram Stories — If you want to run a quick giveaway (less than 24 hours) and/or target your most loyal, engaged followers, take advantage of Instagram Stories. The Questions feature is a great tool for soliciting private answers (unlike the public comments section where trivia answers are quickly spoiled), while the Quiz feature can introduce a multiple-choice component to giveaways.
Create an Enticing Giveaway
Goal and structure in mind, it’s time to compile the components of your giveaway. A good giveaway package has three things: value, appeal, and exclusivity.
Value can be monetary — products, vouchers, services, etc. — or experiential. The higher the value, the more noise it tends to make on social media.
Appeal is a given on Instagram. The products or experiences featured in your giveaway must be attractive and inviting. The more content you can create explaining the appeal of your giveaway, the better (bonus points if that content includes a Reel).
Exclusivity is the core of any successful Instagram giveaway. Cheap branded merch is fun, but it won’t compel users to meaningfully engage. If you’re looking to do more than get likes or pick up a few new followers, make sure your giveaway is exclusive enough to attract attention and start a conversation.
Hot Tea:
If you’re struggling to come up with a compelling giveaway package, consider collaborating with other brands or products. For our giveaways, we featured products from local small businesses and made one of the giveaway requirements to be following all the participating accounts.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Giveaways
No matter which type of giveaway suites your end goal, there are some general things we DO and DON’T recommend when it comes to Instagram giveaways:
DO establish giveaway rules and articulate them clearly. No shade, but the Internet is not known for its reading comprehension skills. To avoid confusion — or worse, complaints — make sure the rules for your giveaway are clear, concise, and in a position of prominence (we recommend in the post caption itself as comments can be overlooked).
DO create a hashtag for user-generated content contests. This will allow you to easily aggregate all submissions across feed posts and Stories.
DO alert giveaway winner(s) promptly and share the news with your followers. This ensures followers your giveaway is legitimate and builds anticipation for your next giveaway.
DON’T let giveaways run too long. If you’re looking for a high volume of entrants — or to rack up more post engagement — it can be tempting to run giveaways for a long time. But attention spans are short on social media, and the best Instagram giveaways capitalize on fleeting, exclusive moments.
DON’T spam the feed. It’s tempting to want to replicate the success of an Instagram giveaway, but the age-old adage is true: quality is better than quantity. Oversaturating your feed with giveaways will lessen their impact and cheapen their value. Instead, focus on facilitating thoughtful, intentional giveaways your followers will find exciting and enticing.
DON’T violate any laws. Make sure your giveaway is legal by adhering to all regional and platform-specific rules for contests and sweepstakes.
Instagram Giveaway Case Study
This summer, we put all this research to the test and ran two giveaways of our own. The QCC account has a humble following and low engagement, which is an interesting contrast to the large account data circulating most social media blogs. Since we mostly cater to small businesses — often with low engagement and follower counts just like ours — we figured this experiment would be especially valuable to our audience.
To compile our giveaway packages, we reached out to some of our favorite small business owners to see if they wanted to participate. The first giveaway had a culinary theme and featured spices from Tony’s Smokin’ Again, hot sauce from Freddy Foxx’s, a gift card to Collinsville’s Seed 41 restaurant, and fresh produce from Chanticleer Acres (total value over $150).
The second giveaway featured products to use “On the Water,” including sunscreen from Mama Bear Organics, fishing line from Woodstock Line, a colorful towel, and a picnic cooler (total value over $75).
Both giveaways had the same rules. To enter, users had to follow our account and all other participating accounts, like the giveaway post, and tag a friend in the comments. Participants could enter multiple times by tagging multiple friends, or sharing the post to their Stories.
We had several hypotheses going into our giveaway experiment. Here are the exclusive results of our study:
Hypothesis: giveaways improve post engagement
Result: our first giveaway performed 95% better than our average post
Hypothesis: giveaways reach new audiences
Result: on average, 30% of the accounts our giveaways reached were new to @quietcornercomms
Hypothesis: giveaway value is directly proportional to post reach
Result: the first giveaway ($150 value) reached 1.35x more accounts than the second ($75 value)
Instagram Giveaways for Small Businesses
There’s a lot to consider when developing an Instagram giveaway, but with the right strategy and a clear goal, you can create a winning campaign that increases following, generates new leads, boosts engagement, amplifies a brand or product, or produces high-quality UGC.
Need help finding the right goal for your business or crafting the best giveaway structure to meet your needs? Send me an email — I’d love to help make your next Instagram giveaway a success!
