How to Successfully Run an Instagram Giveaway

Instagram giveaways are a fantastic way to engage and grow your audience. However, if a giveaway is not planned and run properly it could fall flat with zero results. 

1. Define your giveaway’s goals.

Do you want to gain more followers? Generate user content? Have more people signed up for your newsletter? It is important to outline your key performance indicators (KPIs) for your giveaway before you run it so you know where you succeeded and what to improve on for future giveaways. This could include metrics like the number of participants, social media engagement, website traffic, and leads generated.

2. Finalize budget and prizes.

For your first giveaway you might want to start off small to test the waters and learn what your audience responds well to. However, you don’t want a prize to be so small that it doesn’t catch the attention of your followers. Consider your marketing budget carefully, what your giveaway goals are, and how much you are willing to spend to realize those goals without going overboard.

3. Create your giveaway assets.

Giveaway assets can vary depending on your goals and prizes. Here are some ideas for what content to create for your giveaway:

• If there is a physical prize involved, such as a gift basket or certain merchandise, an aesthetic picture or reel showing use of the merchandise would be ideal. 

• For a gift card giveaway, you should include pictures or videos of products that would be equal to the gift card’s value instead of just a picture of a gift card. This creates a better idea for followers of what the gift card could be if they win.

• If your goal is more followers, a reel would work the best as that is more likely to spread beyond your current audience. 

• Eye-catching graphics announcing a giveaway could “stop the scroll” and lead followers to read your caption.
  

4. Decide on your giveaway’s rules.

To run smoothly and be able to select a winner, your giveaway will need some rules. These are some you should consider:

• Giveaways or sweepstakes in the United States must be 18+. If you are giving away a gift card to a bar or other age-restricted product, it needs to be 21+.

• Clearly state when your giveaway will end, date and time is preferred. 

• Who they need to be following to be eligible to win. This could be you and a giveaway partner. 

• How the participants will enter. This could be through one or a combination of:

• Liking the post.

• Commenting. This could be in response to a question, or as simple as a themed emoji (Once or multiple times).

• Tagging a friend in the comments. (Once or multiple times).

• Sharing the post to their story.

  • If including this as a requirement, the prize should be quite large for success. Many people do not like sharing giveaways on their pages unless it’s a big-ticket win.

  • When sharing to stories is required to enter, you should add a requirement that private accounts should message you a screenshot of their story.

  • When I run a giveaway with this requirement, I will respond to their story in our messages with a special emoji. That way I know it was a giveaway story share even after their story expires.

  • This is usually best used as a “bonus entry.”

• How long a winner has to respond. If a winner never checks their messages, it could leave you in limbo on awarding your prize. I usually give 24 hours before an alternative winner is selected.

• Stipulate how the prize will be delivered. You don’t want an out-of-town winner if you weren’t prepared to ship anything.

5. Select your winner.

I am all for making my job easier when I can. That’s why I use GiveawayPick. It automatically tallies up all comments on a post (it can even compile comments across multiple posts!), checks if they liked the post, if they’re following the right accounts, and will even eliminate duplicate comments if you were only allowing one entry per person. The only element you will still need to check is if you were requiring them to share the giveaway to their stories.

6. Measure your results.

Last but not least! Once your giveaway is all done it is important to go back to the KPIs you set in the beginning and measure your results. In addition, you should make note of things that went wrong or that you really liked. Save these results to refer back to the next time you run a giveaway. 

With these steps, you’ll be able to run a successful giveaway to grow your brand on Instagram. Sign up for Honeypot’s newsletter here to receive my next blog post on creative giveaway ideas!