The Ultimate Guide to Hosting the Best Instagram Giveaways to Generate More Followers

When it comes to Instagram events, giveaways are a great way to quickly increase follower count. Many successful Instagrammers have hosted giveaways in the past and they will continue to do so in an attempt to scale the Insta ladder.

However, it’s one thing to host a giveaway (which is simple enough) and another thing completely to make the most of it. So, if you’re an Instagrammer who’s on the lookout for more Instagram views and followers, read on. In this article, we’re going to discuss all the ways you can use giveaways on Instagram to increase your follower count and become bigger on one of the world’s biggest social media platforms.

1. Focus on the reason why you want to host a giveaway in the first place

Hosting a giveaway without a goal will in all likelihood result in a failure to increase views and/or followers. If you’re active on other social media platforms as well, you could also tap into Instagram giveaways to increase followers on those platforms. For example, if your Facebook page lacks following compared to your Insta page, you could host a giveaway with the goal of directing the participants to your Facebook page.

If your priority is to sell your products or services, the best thing to do is to focus on growing the number of your email subscribers. Typically, influencers are able to do much more in terms of selling when they reach out to their audiences over email. This is due to the fact that emails can be made to include more value, which will provide more information to your audiences about your products and/or services. So, the first thing you need to do before hosting an Instagram giveaway is to decide on why you’ll be hosting it in the first place.

2. Pick the prize

Once you’ve identified the reasons behind hosting the giveaway, it’s time to select the prize that you’re going to giveaway. The prize you choose is completely up to you, but it’s best to make it one that’s relevant to your audience. For example, if you’re a fashion and lifestyle influencer, you could choose an appropriate product based on your niche. If you’re merely an influencer and don’t have any products of your own to sell, it’s best to collaborate with a brand in your niche. By giving away the brand’s products, you’ll be helping it to reach new audiences as well.

However, if you have products to sell, it’s best to give away samples of those products to the winners. For example, if you’re about to launch a new product, you could host a giveaway and offer samples of the about-to-be-launched product as prizes. This will encourage your followers and target audiences who aren’t following you yet to participate in the giveaway. The winners will also get to try out your products for free. If the product is a high-quality one, it’s sure to cement your brand’s reputation as one that can be trusted.

3. Choose the method of participation

So, now you’ve picked your prize as well, and at this juncture, you have to choose the method through which your followers get to participate in your Instagram competition. If you want the giveaway to increase Instagram views, you could ask your followers to tag one of their friends in the comments and like the post. This tactic is typically used to raise brand awareness quickly. You could also feature a question on your website or blog if your primary purpose is to increase viewership on platforms other than Instagram. However, in this situation, you need to tell the participants to provide the answers to the question on Instagram itself.

If you’re hosting a giveaway in collaboration with a brand, you could ask the participants to like the brand’s Instagram page. The prize in this situation could be one of the brand’s products.

4. Decide on the time limit

There are giveaways on Instagram that last for an entire week, and at the same time, there are giveaways that last only for 24 hours. Simply put, the shorter the duration of the giveaway, the greater the sense of urgency that’s created among willing participants. Ideally, your giveaway shouldn’t last for more than a week, and it’s best to choose 3 – 4 days as the duration of the giveaway.

If you stretch the giveaway beyond the 3 – 7 days limit, it’s very likely that the urgency will fizzle out in a few days. Once it does, there’s simply no point of going on with the giveaway, as you’ll have to keep putting in a lot of effort to promote it.

5. Create the post for announcing the giveaway

The blueprint of your Instagram competition is done and dusted, and now it’s time to compile the post that announces the giveaway to your followers. You should make the post as inviting as possible, but remember to keep the language simple and easy to understand. After all, English may be your native language, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all your followers on Instagram are well-versed in the language.

Also, remember to include all instructions related to the rules of participation. Ideally, we’d recommend keeping the rules simple. Being too elaborate may put off your followers and stop them from taking part in your Instagram events. Remember to create a campaign hashtag for your giveaway as well. Hashtag campaigns will allow news of your giveaway to spread like wildfire, making it more likely for the campaigns to be discovered and your page to be liked by new Insta users and brands.

6. Promote the giveaway

So, now that you’ve created the post and published it on Instagram, it’s time to promote the giveaway. This is where you have to put in the most effort because if you don’t promote Instagram giveaways, it’s very likely that they won’t make the sort of impact that you want them to. When it comes to big brands with hundreds and thousands of followers, it’s not very difficult for the giveaway post to be seen and shared. However, for Instagram pages with only a handful of followers, the task at hand is quite hard.

However, there are ways you can implement to ensure that the giveaway is promoted as much as possible. For starters, you should give your followers a slight hint regarding an upcoming giveaway. This will ensure that your followers are glued to your Instagram feed to check for routine updates, making it more likely for them to come across the giveaway. Instagram also has a very potent feature called Stories. You should use this feature as much as possible to promote the giveaway and not just during the contest, but before and after it as well. You can also send emails to all your existing followers. Who knows? They might spread the word about the giveaway and do some promoting on your behalf. Also share the news of your giveaway on all your other social media pages across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp.

7. Choose the winner

Once your giveaway comes to a close, it’s time to pick a winner out of all the entries. If there are hundreds of entries you can pick multiple winners. However, if the number of entries is on the lower side, it’s best to pick a single winner. Ultimately, the choice is yours as to how many winners you want to pick. There’s a variety of ways through which you can choose the winner. The most time-consuming method is to use a random name generator. Using such a generator would require you to enter the names of all the participants manually. Once all the names have been entered into the generator, you only need to click a button for the generator to randomly come up with a name.

If you want to pick the winner without putting in a lot of effort, you can use Google’s random number generator as well. To use it, simply enter 1 as the minimum number and the total amount of entries as the maximum. Next, click on ‘Generate’, following which Google will give you a random number. If your giveaway is based on participants leaving comments on the post, this method is ideal for choosing the winner. Once you have the number, simply browse through the comments until you find the winner. For example, if the random number generated by Google is 26, the user who wrote the 26th comment on the post of your giveaway will be the winner.

Conclusion

So, that’s about it for this post. We’ve given you all the information that you could want to know about hosting a giveaway on Instagram. Before you host an Instagram giveaway, it’s important that you have at least a few hundred followers.

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