You’ve seen them before: the social media giveaway. They’re all over lately, especially on Instagram! Why would you want to give free products or services away, though? And if you do decide it’s the right move for your business, how do you execute on it effectively? We’re exploring all that and more on the blog today!

Why Social Media Giveaways are Worthwhile

It’s never a good idea to start implementing a new social media tactic just because you see other accounts doing it. There needs to be a solid strategy behind the tactics you’re using, and goals at the forefront of your mind. What are some things you can accomplish by running a social media giveaway?

Increase Engagement

Engagement is one of the most popular metrics to track on social media these days. What is engagement? It’s the likes, comments, and shares your social media posts receive from your audience (for a refresher on social media terms, check out our handy glossary). When running a giveaway, you typically ask your followers and their friends to leave comments on a specific post. This is a great way to boost engagement on your page! A giveaway doesn’t necessarily lead to a sustained increase in engagement, but it’s a solid way to jumpstart things.

Raise Brand Awareness

Who doesn’t want more brand awareness for their business? When you run giveaways regularly, especially when you partner with other businesses, it’s a great way to get your brand in front of new eyeballs. Those partnerships can also be incredibly helpful because it’s essentially giving you a warm intro to the other business’s audience (and vice versa! It’s mutually beneficial).

Grow Your Following

While follower count isn’t everything, it can be important to grow your following. Perhaps you’re closing in on the coveted 10,000 followers and the swipe up feature! Running a giveaway can be a great way to gain followers so that more people see your content regularly.

Best Practices for Giveaways

Follow the Rules

This is one of the most important and basic things: know the rules of each platform and follow them. For reference, here are the Facebook Guidelines, Twitter Guidelines, and Instagram Guidelines. A few takeaways:

On Facebook, you cannot ask people to share the post, like your page, or tag friends in the comments. You can ask them to comment on the post themselves or like the post.
On Twitter, their main concern is fake accounts. Make sure you discourage entrants from creating multiple accounts to entire multiple times.
On Instagram, you must emphasize that the contest is not affiliated with or sponsored by Instagram in any way. Surprisingly, unlike Facebook, you can encourage people to tag friends in the comments or follow your account.

Determine Your Goal

As we discussed, there are several different things you can accomplish through social media giveaways. Are you hoping to increase your followers so you can hit a milestone? Looking to boost engagement? Raise brand awareness? The goal you’re aiming to achieve may impact the type of contest you run, so keep that in mind moving forward.

In this giveaway from bless the messy, you can tell she is aiming for brand awareness and engagement- she’s looking for comments and shares, not followers

Pick a Prize

What will you be giving away? The tasks you ask your followers to do should be tailored to the value of the prize. If you’re asking them to leave a comment and follow you, that can be a smaller prize. If you’re hoping folks will create user-generated content, sharing photos to a specific hashtag for the contest, then you may want to offer a more valuable prize.

Choose a Platform

Make sure you pick a platform that makes sense for your audience. I most frequently see giveaways taking place on Instagram; I almost never see them on Twitter. That doesn’t mean you should rule out Twitter, but consider whether or not it’s a good fit for your brand and your target demographic. Also keep the rules (mentioned above) top of mind. If you have an objective you want to achieve, like growing your following, Facebook doesn’t let you ask for people to like your page, so you won’t want to do a Facebook giveaway.

Keep it Simple

Make sure your contest is easy to understand. A common trend is loop giveaways, where you must follow 8-10 new accounts, following the instructions in each caption and jumping from one profile to the next. These types of giveaways are a pain in the butt! You don’t want your audience to be aggravated with you. And this kind of contest often leads to attrition, with folks unfollowing all the pages they followed if they don’t win. Make sure everything is clear and straightforward, without unnecessary tasks.

That’s not to say you can’t partner with other businesses! Partnering with 1-2 other brands can be a great way to get in front of a new, warm audience. Just keep it to a manageable number so people don’t get overwhelmed.

Allowing people to enter multiple times by either leaving multiple comments or sharing the post to their Stories may make things a tiny bit more complicated for you, but it doesn’t overcomplicate things for your audience, so this is a great tactic to utilize! Sharing to Stories can be especially useful in getting your brand in front of more people.

Be Transparent

Transparency is key when running giveaways. What’s the timeline? Make sure you’ve mentioned it up front. Shorter is usually better as it gives a sense of urgency to the contest. 24-48 hours works well. If you leave a contest up for a week or longer, people will lose interest.

Make sure you’re crystal clear on how you’ll be picking a winner. Choosing at random is usually best; you’ll want to avoid any accusations of nepotism or favoritism. It should be truly random.

Select a Winner

When the time comes to select a winner, you can google “random number generator” and one comes right up built into Google Chrome. That’s an awesome way to pick your winner! You can also write out the handles by hand and do a live video where you pick the winner--that’s a great way to engage your audience. Make sure that once you’ve drawn your winner, you double check that they are following you and have completed all the tasks you asked for in the rules outlined in your caption.

Once you’ve announced the winner and followed up with them directly, make sure you provide ways for your new followers to stay engaged. You can leave a comment with a preview of new content to come or even offer info on where they can buy the product they were so eager to win!

Measure the Results

Last but not least, don’t forget to review how the giveaway performed. You can track followers gained, impressions and reach, and engagement. For more on reviewing social media data, check out our series on analytics:

Have you run (or entered) a social media giveaway before? What have you found effective? What have you found annoying when entering giveaways? Share your thoughts! Tweet me at @servemethesky.

For more social media guidance, make sure you sign up for our unboring email newsletter!

Get SkyMail

Blog