How to Use Giveaways to Boost Your Instagram Followers

Instagram is a very popular and powerful platform for marketers to promote their businesses. You can use it to let people know about your products and services in an engaging and authentic way without having to hard sell to your customers.

But to make the most out of Instagram, you need to have a strong follower base. Having more followers increases the possibility of getting more engagement. When people interact with you so frequently, they become familiar with your brand. This builds trust and because of that, people are more likely to buy your products too.

So if you haven’t yet worked on growing your followers, you need to get started now. There are several ways of increasing your followers on social media.

But the best way to make people follow you is to organize giveaways on Instagram. People love freebies and by seeing you organize giveaways they would surely want to join the contest. This is a great opportunity for you to capture their interest and make them follow you.

Here are 5 different ways of using giveaways to boost Instagram followers.

1. Decide the Entry Criteria

The first trick to attract Instagram followers with giveaways is to set the entry criteria for the participants. You need to be very clear with the goal of the giveaway even before you make it go live. In this case, your goal is to increase your followers. So set your criteria based on that.

For example, you can let only those people participate in the giveaway who will:

• Follow your page (this should be compulsory for every participant)
• Repost your giveaway post with a specific hashtag
• Tag 2 or more people in the post

This will not only help you gain more followers but will also help your giveaway gain more exposure. And the more exposure it gets the more participants you have. Since it’s compulsory for your participants to follow you, your follower count will automatically rise too.

2. Give a Great Prize

The next step is to choose an amazing prize that will attract your target audience. You’ll have many participants just because they are tempted to win the gift. So offer a prize that people would love to have.

But make sure that the prize is relevant to your business. There’s no point in giving away a Macbook if your business is about cosmetics.

Instead, you can give away a cosmetic product from your company, a makeover, even discount coupons to buy your products.

This is also a great way to gain brand exposure and convert your leads to sales. Because when people land on your website to use their coupons, they’ll check out your other products too.

3. Create Reminders

Instagram is loaded with great content from users, at all times. So even though you’ve shared your giveaway post, it might get buried under the new posts that keep coming up every second.

If you don’t want that to happen, you need to create reminders throughout your giveaway, notifying and updating people about what’s happening. This will keep things fresh.

But don’t go overboard by posting multiple reminders in a single day. Seeing the same post over and over can annoy your followers and they might even consider unfollowing you.

Instead, you can try creating super attractive reminders and post it, maybe at an interval of 2 days or so depending on how long you want to run the giveaway.

4. Make Use of Relevant Hashtags

Another very important factor to consider when running a giveaway is the use of relevant hashtags. You need to be very careful when choosing your hashtags for the giveaway posts.

Using hashtags like #giveaway or #contest may not be a great idea because this might attract people who’re interested in entering any giveaway possible just for the sake of winning the prize.

While this will increase your follower count, you won’t be able to reach the target audience that you wanted to. Also, it won’t make your giveaway stand out as a specific hashtag would.

That’s why make use of hashtags that are relevant to your giveaway. This will also help people identify it easily.

5. Promote Your Giveaway

If you really want your giveaway to be successful, you need to promote it well. A good idea for that can be to start promoting the giveaway even before it starts.

You can talk about it in your stories or other social channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc., and let people know about it in bits and pieces.

But make sure not to reveal the information all at once. Instead, try to build excitement and anticipation amongst your audience.

Another brilliant idea is to embed your Instagram page on your website. This will let your visitors know about your giveaway even if they miss it on social media.

You can also send a newsletter to your email subscribers to promote your giveaway once it’s live. The more you promote it the more successful you can expect it to be.

Instagram is a wonderful platform where you can find potential customers for your business. But without a good following, you can’t really use it to your best advantage. So, use the tips discussed in the post to organize a great giveaway that’ll help you grow your followers instantly.