How To Host An Instagram Giveaway
Instagram Giveaway's for Businesses & Creatives
Hey friends!! It's me, back with some more Insta biz tips & tricks!
This week I wanted to focus on giveaways. Whether you're a creator, or a business selling your own products, giveaways can be a great way to gain exposure, while giving back to your online friends! But not all giveaways are created equal and you don't want a giveaway that flops... right?!
Giveaways need 3 things to be successful
- An Audience
- A targeted prize
- The right prize to requirements ratio
I found it really difficult to decide which of these I was going to write about first, because they truly go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other if you want to have a successful giveaway. But since I have to choose, let’s talk about gaining an audience first.
Audience
There are a few different ways you can get an audience for your giveaway. You can either use your own audience which is what I would assume most of you would be doing. You can also team up with other creators to create a product/service bundle. Or if you sell your own products you can either leverage the audience of a page or boost your own ad. So let’s dive a little deeper into each of these methods!
Use Your Own Audience
If you’re using your own audience, your giveaway will perform a lot better if you have an actively engaged audience. One way you can work on building a strong relationship with your audience is to show them love and engage right back! Reply to all your comments, be open and real in your captions, and show up as you, whoever that may be! People connect with REAL and genuine! And connections make sales.
Having an audience is not the only factor that will determine a successful giveaway though. Having a targeted prize and the right prize to requirements ratio are going to be your makers or breakers, but we’ll get to that later on.
Team Up With Other Creators
The next way you can gain an audience for your giveaway is to team up with other creators. Something I did recently was team up with 5 creators who all sold their own presets. We created a bundle giveaway and all shared it on our own pages!
One of the requirements to enter was that they had to follow each of our accounts. I think I gained over 100 followers that week! Not only is it a great way to bring awareness to your products, but you can also gain a lot of exposure this way! I've heard of other creators compiling a cash prize for their audiences! This is also a great option because who doesn't love money?!
Nowww it’s important that when you team up with others, these other creators are in your same niche. If your followers are into outdoors and hiking and you team up with a fashion or beauty influencer, your audience might not participate in the giveaway because they don’t want to follow a bunch of random accounts they aren’t interested in. So make sure you team up with others who you know your audience would love!
Leverage The Audience Of A Page
If you happen to sell your own products, you might be interested in leveraging the audience of a page. When I say page, I’m not talking about a large influencer, I’m talking about a large page that shares the work of others, typically not their own work. And if their audience aligns with your giveaway/niche then you can actually pay them to post your giveaway for you! Or you can post it yourself and pay to boost your own ad! If this is the case, then you’ll have to be sure you have a good prize to requirements ratio!
Targeted Prize
Like I said before, having a targeted prize is just as important as having an audience! If you choose a prize that your audience isn’t interested in, then they aren’t going to participate leaving you with a giveaway that flops. So how can you make sure you pick the right prize? Think about what your followers are into - this is where having a broad niche can get a little tricky.
Why are people following you? If you have a super broad niche, certain people can be following you for different reasons. For some, it may be your style, for others it could be your creative photos, your love for the outdoors, or whatever else it might be. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but think about what the majority of your followers are into. What are they posting about and does your prize align with their wants or needs?
If you feel that you had a targeted prize, it just wasn’t targeted enough for your audience there’s no need to worry! What you should do is engage with accounts who share hashtags relevant to that niche. That way you can build upon that particular following without having to worry about it not aligning totally with your current audience!
Prize To Requirements Ratio
Last, but certainly not least important, is having a proper prize to requirements ratio. This one can be a little tricky, because if you’re giving something away like a car then you can make the requirements a little more lengthy. But if you’re giving away something small, then people might not think following 15 new accounts, tagging 3 friends below in separate comments, and sharing it in their story is worth the entry! Plus this can come off as disingenuine and seem like you're only trying to gain exposure instead of actually bringing value to your audience!
Try to minimize the number of requirements for your followers, you want to make entering the giveaway as simple as you can! If you’re working with a brand, typically this will mean following that brand and tagging a friend in the comments. You can also say that each friend tagged is a new entry to encourage them to tag more, and the same goes for sharing it in their stories!
If you’re giving away your own product or service then you can make the requirements even easier to enter. Typically for mine, I only require that they follow me and tag a friend in the comments. That, mixed with a targeted prize always makes for a giveaway hit!!Â
Picking The Winner
If you’re not sure how to pick a winner, here’s the site I use - AppSorteos! It allows you to enter extra entries for story shares too. If that’s one of your requirements I would screenshot each person who shared it to their story because you have to manually enter their user name for extra entries!
I hope you found that helpful! If you’re looking a clear cut strategy to grow your account, work with brands, imporve your content, and build financial freedom as a content creator in 2022, click the link below!
