Promoting a post from your Instagram Business profile helps you to reach a larger audience. So you can achieve more views, more engagement, and hopefully more successful conversions. And you may also have heard that an Instagram giveaway can grow your following 70% faster than other methods. Put those two things together, and you have a winning strategy that won’t break the budget.
The simplest type of Instagram giveaway is a comments contest. Start by asking your followers a quick question – what’s your favorite color? How do you use this product? What do you want for Christmas? Then you can collect all the responses, and pick a winner at random.
But here’s where it gets complicated. What if you shared the giveaway in a promoted post, as well as on your profile? And how can you manage users who don’t follow the exact rules? For a more professionalized giveaway, you’ll need something like the multi-network giveaway app.
It only takes minutes to set up a giveaway. If you have a Facebook Ads account linked to your Instagram, and an active Easypromos BASIC PRO plan, you’re good to go! Read on for instructions.
Help! Where are all the participants?
You probably started by publishing a giveaway post on your Instagram profile. Once you have the post, you can choose to promote it to a wider audience.
But when you use an automatic tool to collect the comments, you’ll only see the responses to your original post. Where are all the participants from your promoted post? It’s all because of the way Instagram sponsored posts are managed.
Instagram sponsored posts are controlled by Facebook Ads. That’s why you can create sponsored posts from both within Instagram, and the Facebook Ads manager. When you decide to promote an Instagram post, Facebook Ads creates a duplicate of the original in order to promote it. So in total, you have one original post, and one separate, sponsored post.
(And in case that wasn’t confusing enough, promoted posts on Facebook work differently, too. But that’s another blogpost!)
Result: you need an app which can recognize both your original posts, and the duplicate Instagram sponsored posts. That’s why we recommend the multi-network app, where you can add multiple posts from multiple profiles to the same giveaway. Here’s how…
How to run giveaways with Instagram sponsored posts
- When the giveaway’s participation period ends, go to the Easypromos control panel and choose the multi-network giveaway app.
- Connect to social media and import your giveaway posts. You can follow this tutorial for extra help.
- Click Add a promoted post to include comments on your Instagram sponsored posts.
Once you have grouped the comments for the organic and promoted posts, it’s time to pick the winners. To learn more about how to do it check out this article.
How to use Instagram sponsored posts alone
There’s more than one way to set up an Instagram giveaway. For example, if you want to share an exclusive promotion with new leads, you might create a giveaway which only exists as a promoted post.
Can you still use the multi-network app? Yes! Just create your contest, connect to social media, and choose the option Add promoted posts.
