Have you tried hosting an Instagram giveaway to treat your audience to something free and promote your brand? As fun and exciting as Instagram giveaways can be for your audience, they’re also excellent for growing your followers. Successful Instagram giveaways bring more people to your page, spread awareness for your brand, and increase engagement for your account.
7 Ways to Grow Your Instagram Following with Instagram Giveaways
Here, we uncover the top tactics you can use to make a successful Instagram giveaway that grows your follower account and converts followers to fans — and possibly even customers.
1. Encourage New Followers
One of the easiest ways to ensure those who participate in your Instagram giveaway benefit your account is to request a ‘follow’ as an entry. Instagram does not allow accounts to require that others follow their account as a giveaway entry. However, you can encourage people to do so and count it as an entry when they do. So, for example, if someone were to like your post as a mandatory entry and follow your account, they can have two entries rather than one.
2. Make Tags Count as Entries
Screenshot from @after13weeks via Instagram
Ask your giveaway participants to tag other accounts for extra entries. When someone tags other accounts in a comment, those accounts will get notified, and it could lead to more entries on your giveaway.
Be aware that this may lead to several tags for spam and bot accounts. Therefore, it’s a good idea to have some restrictions in place, such as only allowing two tags per person or making it known that you or your moderators will manually check tagged accounts for validity.
3. Collaborate with Someone Else for the Giveaway
An Instagram collab post lets you invite another account as a collaborator on your post. They’ll receive the same comments, likes, and shares that you do for that post, and their audience will see everything that your audience does. That means double the eyes on your giveaway post. To add a collaborator, create your Instagram post as usual. Before posting, tap ‘Tag people’ and ‘Invite collaborator.’
4. Promote the Giveaway on Instagram Live
Use Instagram Live to promote your giveaway. You can show the product or service you’re giving away, give people a chance to ask questions, and give exclusive opportunities for extra entries for people who attended the Live session. If your audience has their notifications set to alert them when you go live on Instagram, they’ll be able to view your Live as soon as it starts. To ensure that plenty of people attend, you could create a couple of promotional Instagram posts leading up to the event.
5. Share Your Giveaway to Your Story
Screenshot from @happypillco_ via Instagram
After creating a giveaway post in your feed, share that post to your Story to allow more people to see it. Your Stories can be viewed by any current follower or anyone else on Instagram if you’ve made them public, potentially giving more visibility to your giveaway. Consider adding an entry for people viewing your Story, such as answering a question you post in the Story or sharing your Story with someone else. Another idea is to offer an extra entry to users who share any of your previous posts to their Story and tag your account, like @happypillco_ did in their plush toy giveaway.
6. Ask a Question for More Engagement
Leave a question for your giveaway participants to answer in the caption of your post or in the post itself. More comments lead to more visibility and potential engagement on Instagram. Therefore, requiring an answer to your question as a giveaway entry can build engagement quickly and could grow your following. Make the question highly relevant to your giveaway or brand so that it makes sense for your audience.
7. Create a Giveaway Series
Instagram audiences often enjoy the predictability of following an account with cohesive branding and a regular posting schedule. Lean into that predictability with your giveaways by offering regular contests for followers to enjoy. Hosting a giveaway series is one way to do it. You can run a weekly or monthly giveaway, for example, which might encourage Instagram users to follow you to avoid missing contest updates. Use Instagram giveaway templates to save time setting up and launching your contests.
Start Hosting Successful Instagram Giveaways
Instagram giveaways don’t need to be complicated. In fact, some of the simplest giveaways with straightforward rules gain plenty of traction and engagement to help build audience growth. These giveaway examples are good ones to gain inspiration from as you dive into Instagram giveaways.
After hosting a few, pay attention to what works well for your brand, account, and audience. Use Instagram Insights to pinpoint your most popular giveaway content, making note of what you did differently in your top giveaways that might have led to interaction and audience growth. Meanwhile, install the Instagram follow button on your blog or website for steady Instagram growth even when your giveaways aren’t actively running.
