Since 80% of Instagram users follow at least one brand, it makes sense that you would want to increase your exposure and reach on the platform. But because the competition is so strong, this may be a hard thing to do.
There are a few Instagram marketing strategies that have worked well in the past, which is good news. You could plan your posts to get the most interaction, work with an influencer to spread the word, or hire a content producer to make more interesting content.
You could also hold a giveaway on Instagram to please your current followers and bring in new people to your page. Simply put, an Instagram giveaway lets you give something away in exchange for a follower, a comment, or some other action you choose.
How to Give Something Away on Instagram
Instagram giveaways are always a good idea because they help you keep customers, spread the word about your brand, and get you and your product the attention it deserves. Here’s how you can easily run your own Instagram giveaway:
Pick the Prize to Give Away
First, you should choose the product, service, or experience you’ll give as a reward. This depends on your goals. For example, if you want to get people to know about a new product, you should probably give that product away as the prize.
Instead, you might want to work with a company to come up with a unique reward that will appeal to all of your target markets.
Last but not least, instead of giving away a product or service, think about giving away an experience, like a weekend trip, a day at the spa, or the chance to meet an important person in your field and network with them.
TIP: Choose a prize that fits your niche. For example, if you are a Gaming Content Creator and you want to grow your audience, you could offer ‘n’ number of subscribers a free “In-Game Pass” or “Game Currency” or something similar.
Set the rules for entering the contest.
Again, your final objective will determine your admission requirements. For example, if you just want to get more people to know about your brand, you could ask each participant to like your post and comment with the name of a friend. By doing this, you can reach more people right away and maybe get them to follow you.
Instead, you might want to draw attention to your blog or another page on your site. If so, you could send people to your blog or website to find out what they need to do to enter, like answer a question in the comments section of your Instagram post.
Last but not least, you may have worked with a company that asked you to include a request to follow their brand as one of your entry requirements in exchange for getting one of their products as a reward.
Pick a reason for your Instagram contest.
By setting a clear goal, you can make changes to your plan and keep track of whether or not your giveaway worked.
Depending on what makes the most sense for your business, your goal may be to get more people to visit your website, get more people to follow you, get more people involved, or make more sales.
Think of a brand partnership or collaboration.
For this, let’s go back to the example of the game content creator we talked about earlier. Try working with a big gamer who makes content to grow your audience. It will give you or your brand the power to promote it to the right people on a large scale. Take the case of the Indian gaming content creator Carryminati (also known as Ajey Nagar) and the ASUS brand. Since the partnership began last year, sales of ASUS ROG are through the roof.
Pick a #Hashtag for your campaign.
Most of the time, hashtags on Instagram make your content more visible and help it show up in Explore channels. Think about coming up with a catchy and unique marketing hashtag to spread the word about your offer. In addition to #giveaway, you can add #[Brand_Name]giveaway, #[Brand_Name]contest, or something similar.
Give away something on Instagram? Add a timer.
Put a time limit in the caption and “Giveaway Closed” at the end to let people know when it’s time to finish the rules. You could say, “Giveaway! For example, “In the next 24 hours, please tag a friend and name your favorite vacation spot in the comments for a chance to stay the night at one of our resorts.”
In a perfect world, the time limit will give your followers a sense of urgency and make them interact with your post more quickly. This will also help your giveaway stay at the top of your fans’ Instagram feeds.
Start your Instagram contest and tell people about it.
After choosing your reward, entry requirements, possible partners, hashtag, time limit, goal, and post’s purpose, you can now start it and get the word out. Remember that Instagram users like to post at certain times of the day, so make your plans accordingly.
Also, if you talk about your giveaway in a blog post, on your Facebook page, or on another social media site, you’ll probably get more people interested. For the best results, you should think about giving away prizes in more than one place.
Ways to give things away on Instagram
When you’re ready to make your contest public, you can ask people to do a few different things in exchange for a chance to win.
Here are some of the most popular ideas for giveaways:
- Followers who “like” your post will be entered to win a free product or service. This makes people more interested.
- Followers can enter by writing the name of a friend they want to win in the comments section. This lets you reach more Instagram users and get your business in front of new leads.
- Ask your fans to like your giveaway and share it on their own channels. This could help your business reach a lot more people. If ten of your followers who each have 100 followers do this, you could reach 1,000 new people.
- To enter to win, ask people to follow your brand, a partner, or both. People like this method because it makes it easy to get more followers.
- As part of a photo contest, ask people to send in pictures of how they use your service or product. Since the posts that your participants make will be seen by their own followers and friends, this is another easy way to get people to know your brand. To get the most attention, you should ask people to use your brand’s hashtag or tag it.
- This should be a caption: Some businesses post pictures with the words “Caption this for a chance to win,” but leave the caption field blank. Once everyone who entered your giveaway has had a chance to come up with a clever caption for your photo, you can add it to your post and give credit to the winner.
How to Give Away on Instagram
When your contest is over, it’s time to pick a winner, but how can you do it in a fair way? Here are three tools you can use to make a successful Instagram giveaway.
Wishpond
Wishpond is a great tool that can help you plan and keep track of your Instagram giveaways.
If you use Wishpond to run a giveaway with an Instagram hashtag, you can see all of the people who entered on your dashboard. Users can even add a way to vote on which submission is the best.
The goal of this kind of tool is to help you make your giveaways and promotions better. If you want to run Instagram contests often, it would be smart to invest in a platform like this.
WooBox
With WooBox, you can make and run contests, giveaways, polls, coupons, forms, and more quickly and easily.
You can download your Instagram comments and use them to pick a winner or more at random. This program also makes it easy to export comments from Instagram and collect contact information for winners.
If you want to use a cheap tool, this is a great choice. There is a free plan for small contests, but for bigger ones, there is an enterprise-level power plan.
It’s a great idea to use a program to keep track of and organize your freebies. Let’s look at how a giveaway works right now.
EasyPromos
EasyPromos makes it easier to run an Instagram giveaway or contest, just like Wishpond does.
You can use this tool to keep track of comments made on one or more posts. You can use it to decide if people tagged the right number of friends in their comments and to help you pick the winner at random.
The price of the base package is fair, and it doesn’t come with any extras. This is a great solution if you want to give away simple things without using landing pages or marketing automation.
As an alternative, there are many paid services that will give you the tools you need to manage giveaways for a business.
You can really pick the winner at random in a few different ways. Here are some of the options:
Use a random number generator that is free.
Even though it would be time-consuming, especially if you had hundreds of entries, you could count up how many people took part in your offer and then use a random number generator to pick the winner.
Say, for instance, that 500 people have replied to your post. If you type “random number generator” into Google’s search bar, a box with Google’s number generator will appear in the search results. You can also use another number generator tool if you prefer.
The most people should be involved, and the least should be one. When you click “Generate,” the tool will give you a random number. Go back to your post and start counting until you reach the username in the comments section that matches that number.
App EasyPromos
You could organize your contest with an app like EasyPromos’ Instagram Sweepstakes App, which can make sure that the winner is chosen quickly and fairly.
With the EasyPromos app, you can sort the finalists by how many friends they have mentioned. Once your offer is over, the tool can randomly choose between one and a thousand winners. It can also randomly choose new winners. You can use the tool’s test run before making the final sketch.
The best part is that EasyPromos gives you a link to a certificate of authenticity that proves the draw was done at random. This ensures that you and your participants will be open and honest with each other. You can change the certificate to fit your brand.
Use a tool for coming up with names
This last method probably takes the most time, but if there aren’t many people entering the giveaway, you might want to choose the winner by username instead of a random number. This could be a good choice for you, especially if you already have a spreadsheet with your list of names.
If you want to use a random name generator, go to a site like Miniwebtool.com and type each username on a separate line into the text box there. Then click the button and choose a name.