Best Practices for Instagram Giveaways

Most Instagram users follow at least one business account which makes social media presence and visibility a vital part of your marketing strategy. With 95 million posts published every day, it’s sure a difficult task to cut through the noise and stand out from the crowd. 

Luckily, there are certain ways in which you can differentiate your brand from its competitors and make an impact on your target audience, one of them being Instagram giveaways. They not only generate engagement and attract new followers to your account, but they also help you establish relationships with your audience, as well as promote products and services in a fun and informal way. 

Social media giveaways are low-commitment strategies that tend to have impressive ROI results. However, it’s important to follow certain guidelines and rules so that your giveaway is transparent and reliable. We’re about to take you through best practices for Instagram giveaways so that you can take your account to the next level!

Start by coming up with entry requirements

Running comment giveaways is a great way to generate engagement, which leads to better positioning and visibility of your brand. And our Instagram Giveaway app makes it easy to collect all comments left on your promotional post! This is why we suggest you come up with an open question that users answer in order to enter your giveaway. Apart from boosting engagement, you will also see some real conversations unfolding in the comments section.

Would you like to attract to your brand more people? Ask participants to mention friends in the comments! Each mentioned person is a new potential giveaway participant!

Many brands launch Instagram giveaways in order to grow their following. You can ask participants to follow your account, however, you won’t be able to automatically check if they follow you when choosing the winner. Once the app chooses the winner of your Instagram giveaway, you will have to manually check if they’re your follower.

You can also ask participants to like the giveaway post, however, this is also something that you’d have to check manually. Also, Instagram is now removing likes in some countries so it might not be the best option for your brand.

Choose a relevant and attractive prize for your Instagram giveaway

For marketers, Instagram giveaways mean increased engagement, visibility, and social media presence. But your followers focus only on the prize that you’re offering; this is why raffling an attractive and audience-relevant prize is a key to success when running an Instagram giveaway. Dedicate some time to decide on the prize that would work best for your audience. You could, for example, give away pieces of your new collection, offer product bundles, or raffle store credit. Or like in the following example, offer free pizza for a year!

And here’s how a jewelry shop celebrated Women’s Day with an Instagram giveaway. Specializing in products that appear to the majority of women, Chakra Jewels gave away an attractive gift to one lucky winner.

Use the words “giveaway” and “win” in your post

Another way to grab attention for your Instagram giveaway is to make sure that your post stands out from the crowd. Adding the words “giveaway” and “win” to the image, and using them in the text will definitely capture the attention you’re looking for. 

Put yourself in the shoes of your followers scrolling through the Instagram feed whilst commuting or queuing to buy their morning coffee. The following post would definitely catch your attention for a moment longer. 

Apart from just using the magic word “win”, the organizing brand showcased the prize and also specified what it was. That’s a great way of triggering the interest of the target audience. 

Specify participation dates and entry requirements for your Instagram giveaway

Make your Instagram giveaway transparent by precisely specifying the participation dates. If your audience is international you might want to add the time zone so that there’s no unnecessary confusion. 

It’s also important to clearly state the participation requirements. We suggest you bullet point all the steps that interested participants need to follow to enter your Instagram giveaway.

We have more than 60 Instagram giveaway templates! Check them out and use your favorite for your next promotion.

Use emojis in your Instagram giveaway announcement post for more visibility

We’re back to making sure that your giveaway grabs the attention of your target audience. Apart from using attractive images, it’s also important to pay attention to the text you publish. Emojis can help you point out participation requirements or drive users’ attention to important details, for instance, terms and conditions. 

Share terms and conditions for more transparency and information

Terms and conditions are an important part of any digital promotion, including social media giveaways. By sharing T&Cs for your Instagram giveaway, you prove that your promotion is transparent and reliable. You also get to precisely specify all the entry requirements, participation dates, as well as mention location or age restrictions. It’s not only a great way to keep your audience informed but also to protect yourself from possible problems like not being able to ship the prize to certain countries. 

Do you have questions about running Instagram giveaways? Make sure you contact our customer support team!