How to Host Your First (or Next) Instagram Giveaway

Running a giveaway or promotion for your business can bring you more traffic and a whole new audience to your brand. We know it can be really overwhelming to organize, promote, and follow through with a giveaway, but this is your chance to be able to offer up something you know your audience will love. 

There are a few different types of giveaways that we’ve participated in or helped to facilitate on Instagram, and there are definitely pros and cons to each. Today we’ll break down each type of promo and give you tips on how you can get to hosting your own!

First, let’s break down the three main types of Instagram giveaways: loop promo, self promo, and group promo. Each of these promos require a lot of pre-planning, attention to detail, and organization.    

Self Promo

This type of giveaway works well if you either have a product or service to give away from your own business, or if you are highlighting another business by giving something of theirs away. This type of promo only involves one business (yours or someone else's). If you’re choosing to give away something that your business creates, it’s usually to bring attention to your shop, that particular item, or as a thank you to your audience. 

Pros:

• Easy to organize and set up;

• Great way to get your feet wet;

• Helps you highlight other shops, and

• Nice way to bring enthusiasm and attention to your brand.

Cons: 

• Hard to reach a ton of new people (unless you make it required to share as a rule to enter), and

• Might come off as inauthentic if the product you share isn’t in line with your brand.

Group Promo

This type of giveaway is usually set up when you gather up items from your own business and other multiple shops. We’ve hosted group promos when we’re in a launch phase so that we can highlight shops we love. You could gather up items from a few shops and style them together as “a week of giveaways” to draw attention to your launch or business. 

Pros:

• Let’s you tag and highlight multiple shops or businesses, and

• Brings more attention if you’re in launch mode.

Cons:

• Have to get items shipped to you from businesses;

• You’ll have more items to organize and mail out to winners;

• It kind of overtakes your feed during the giveaway period; and

• Harder to keep track of who sent and won certain items.

Loop Promo

(Hint: this is the most intricate type of giveaway, but it could lead to the best results.) 

A loop promo involves multiple Instagram accounts all giving away the same item(s), posting the same image(s) and posting at the same time. The key to this is at the same time. When posted all at once you create a “loop” where you instruct your followers to go through and “follow” all the accounts inside the loop. Your image is tagged with the person your followers are supposed to go and follow, and once they go there they will see the next person tagged and so on until they get back to you (which closes the loop).

Pros:

• Usually leads to a large flux of new followers;

• You probably get to offer something more expensive since you’re combining multiple people in the giveaway; and

• You get to work closely with the other people in the loop.

Cons:

• Takes a lot longer to organize (how much to spend, what to buy, who’s involved, et cetera);

• There will always be someone who makes a gap in the loop because of timing; and

• Might come off as spammy if you do these too often or include too many people in the loop.
  
  

No matter what type of giveaway you end up deciding to try first, the foundations of running a successful giveaway are generally the same. If you follow these eight basic steps, you’ll have a clear control over your giveaway and can potentially reach a lot of new people. 

Decide what kind of promo;

Reach out to potential partners (optional);

Create a graphic or styled image of items;

Create a script to be consistent;

Decide on length of giveaway;

Agree on posting time (if group or loop);

Share, share, share, and

Follow through.

Use Eye-Catching Graphics

It’s no secret that video posts perform better than photos on Instagram, but you don’t actually have to sit face-to-camera and record a video announcing your giveaway. If you add animated elements to your graphics, they’ll upload to Instagram as a video and draw more attention.

That’s why we created a second version of our Animated Social Templates in The Creative Template Shop. They’re fully customizable in Canva and have hand-drawn animated elements. All you have to do is switch up the branding to match your own if you want, insert your own images, and you’re done! They save as a video, and you can easily upload that to Instagram.

If you become a member of The Shop for just $47/month, you can download these and all other templates, plus future releases. It’s definitely the best bang for your buck!

It’s important to remember that you’ll learn what works for you and your audience as you experiment. Not all of these types of giveaways will work for every brand.