How I Run Instagram Giveaways That Get Real Followers

Most Instagram giveaways spike, then leak. You gain a few hundred followers in a week, then watch most of them vanish the day you announce the winner. They wanted the prize, not you, and honestly, who can blame them.

I’ve spent over 13 years writing about giveaways, on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and email, and I see the same thing every time. The ones that actually keep their followers aren’t the ones with the flashiest prize. They’re the ones built to pull in the right person, then give that person a reason to stick around.

So that’s what I’ll walk you through here: how to run an Instagram giveaway that gets you real followers, start to finish. The goal, the prize, the exact setup, promotion, photo contests, partner giveaways, and how to read the results afterward.

Why Run an Instagram Giveaway?

Done well, an Instagram giveaway grows your followers, your email list, and your reach all at once, faster than almost anything else you can do for free. The catch is that most giveaways nail the mechanics and completely miss the point.

Let’s start with the growth math. Accounts that run follower giveaways grow about 70% faster than those that don’t, according to data from Tailwind.

The reason is dead simple. Make following you a condition of entry, and every person who enters is a new follower.

Get them tagging friends or sharing to their Stories, and you turn up in front of people the feed was never going to show you.

The clearest proof I’ve got is one we ran ourselves. The details are in the SeedProd giveaway case study.

SeedProd put a MacBook Air up as a Black Friday prize on RafflePress and launched it a week before the sale. It brought in over 50,000 entries and more than 4,000 new SeedProd users, at 3X the usual sales.

I’ll be straight with you about one thing, though. That was a giveaway hosted on a website, not a native Instagram one.

What makes it worth mentioning is the entry data. Refer-a-friend was the standout action by a mile.

The reach came from people who entered pulling in more people, not from an ad budget.

Email growth works the same way. Basil Thai grew its list by 52% off a single giveaway with one clear goal, which we broke down in our guide to setting giveaway goals.

And an email list is yours. It’s an audience you own outright, not one you’re renting from the algorithm.

Why Host Your Instagram Giveaway on WordPress?

Most people run their giveaway straight from an Instagram caption. It’s the obvious way, and it’s also where the headaches start.

You’re counting entries by hand, you can’t actually verify anyone did anything, and you finish the whole thing without a single email address to show for it.

When I built a test giveaway on WordPress for this guide, the thing that struck me was watching RafflePress verify each entry on its own. That’s the moment the manual way stops making any sense.

Hosting it on your own site fixes all three problems. Here are the two approaches side by side:

What matters	Caption-only giveaway	RafflePress on WordPress
Tracking entries	Manual, by hand	Automatic, in a dashboard
Verifying follows and tags	Not possible	Built-in verification
Duplicate and fake entries	Impossible to catch	Flagged automatically
Capturing emails	None	Every entrant, if you want it
Where the data lives	Instagram	Your site, your ownership

Verification is the quiet hero here. RafflePress checks each entry action before it counts it and flags duplicates, so nobody’s spinning up ten throwaway accounts to rig your draw. Track a hashtag by hand and you get none of that.

There’s a compliance win too. You’re not allowed to force a follow inside a caption, that breaks Instagram’s rules, but a “visit our Instagram profile” action is fine and still gets you the follow.

How to Run an Instagram Giveaway (Step by Step)

My approach to running an Instagram giveaway takes 8 steps. Here they are before we dig in:

Step 1: Set Your Goal

Before you touch anything, decide what you actually want this giveaway to do. This one decision drives everything else, and picking the wrong goal quietly wastes the whole campaign.

Match the goal to how people enter:

• More followers: make following your account a mandatory entry action.
• More likes and engagement: ask entrants to like the post and comment with an answer.
• More reach: offer a bonus entry for sharing the giveaway to their Story.
• More email subscribers: add a “join newsletter” action.
• More sales: prize a product bundle and add a “visit our shop” action.

Then pick the number you’ll judge it on.

Chasing followers? It’s your follower count before and after.

Email? New subscribers. Sales? Orders and revenue during the giveaway and just after.

One primary goal, one secondary at most. Two goals keeps you focused. Five is just a mess.

Step 2: Choose Your Giveaway Format

How people enter should come down to who you’re trying to reach, because different formats pull different crowds.

• Like, follow, and share: low-friction and best for a quick follower boost.
• Tag a friend: the cheapest way to reach new people, since each tag is a personal referral.
• Comment to enter: great for engagement and for learning what your audience actually wants.
• Caption contest: strong for visual brands with a playful audience.
• Photo or UGC contest: best for product businesses with a creative following. (More on this below.)
• Story flash giveaway: reaches followers-of-followers the feed never shows you.

Duration matters just as much. Keep a simple like-follow-share giveaway to 3 to 5 days.

A bigger prize or a photo contest earns 1 to 2 weeks. Push past two weeks and momentum tends to sag, because everyone figures they have loads of time and forgets to enter.

Step 3: Pick a Prize That Attracts Buyers, Not Prize Hunters

Here’s where most giveaways are won or lost: the prize.

Put up a generic gift card and you’ll pull in thousands of people who forget you the second the draw closes. Put up something only your kind of customer would want, and you keep the people worth keeping.

Say you’re a small candle brand…

Give away a $200 Amazon gift card and you’ll get a stampede of entries from people who will never once buy a candle. Give away a build-your-own candle set instead, and suddenly your entrants are candle people, following you because they want more of what you make.

So the entry sequence for that candle brand is simple:

• Follow the account.
• Tag a friend who loves candles.
• Visit the profile.
• Optionally join the newsletter.

Every one of those filters for the right person.

This holds for pretty much any business. Prize your own product, a bundle, or store credit. The narrower the prize, the better the follower you keep.

Step 4: Write the Rules

Good rules keep you legal and keep the giveaway fair, and Instagram has its own guidelines you can’t just ignore. Skip them and you risk getting your post, or your whole account, flagged.

Cover these when you write your giveaway rules:

• Add the disclaimer: state that your giveaway is not sponsored by, endorsed by, or associated with Instagram.
• Don’t gate on likes: Instagram’s rules don’t allow you to require liking a post as the entry mechanic. Keep likes as a bonus, not a gate.
• No inaccurate tagging: don’t ask people to tag themselves in photos they aren’t in.
• State how you handle data: if you collect emails, say what you’ll do with them.
• Set eligibility: age, location, and any “void where prohibited” limits.

You also need at least one free way to enter. Make every entry method cost money and you’ve quietly turned your giveaway into a lottery, which is regulated.

RafflePress will generate a compliant rules page for you, so you’re not writing legal wording from scratch. If you want the source, the full Instagram promotion guidelines are on Instagram’s help site.

Step 5: Build It in RafflePress

RafflePress is our WordPress giveaway plugin, and you build the whole thing in a drag-and-drop editor without touching code. I put one together on a test site while writing this, so what follows is the actual flow I use.

First, install it. Log into your RafflePress account, download the plugin ZIP, then head to Plugins » Add New » Upload Plugin in your dashboard and drop in your license key to activate.

Next, start a new giveaway and pick a template. Go with Grow Your Instagram Following, since it’s already set up with the right entry actions and saves you starting from a blank screen.

Then fill in your prize details: the name, a description, and an image. Your start and end dates live in this same panel, so set them while you’re here.

Now check your entry actions. Because you started from the Instagram template, the set is already there, covering a profile visit, a post or video view, and the refer-a-friend action.

Started from a blank giveaway instead? Add those Instagram actions yourself.

You can even embed the exact post you want people to see inside the action.

Now decide what’s mandatory and what earns bonus entries. One small thing worth knowing: Instagram won’t let anyone verify a follow, so RafflePress uses a visit-your-profile action instead.

Make that one mandatory and every entrant lands on your profile, ready to hit follow. The bonus entries for referrals is what gets the thing spreading.

Tweak the design if you like, then publish. You get three ways to go live: a block on any page, a shortcode, or a standalone giveaway landing page.

I’d use the landing page for anything you promote on social, since it strips out your navigation and sidebar so nothing distracts from the entry form.

Step 6: Write the Announcement Post

Your announcement post is the front door, and a vague one costs you entries. People give it about two seconds, so the prize, the steps, and the deadline all need to be obvious at a glance.

Here’s a caption template that works:

🎉 GIVEAWAY TIME 🎉 We’re giving away [prize] to one lucky winner!

To enter:
✅ Follow @[youraccount]
✅ Like this post
✅ Tag a friend in the comments (each friend = 1 entry)

Want extra entries? Tap the link in our bio.

Ends [date]. Open to [eligibility]. Not sponsored by Instagram. Good luck! 👇

Then sort out your giveaway hashtags. Use 5 to 10, across three tiers:

• 1 to 3 broad tags (over a million posts) for reach.
• 3 to 5 mid-tier tags (100K to 1M) where engaged buyers actually browse.
• 3 to 5 niche tags (under 100K) where your exact audience lives.

And add one branded hashtag of your own, so you can track entries and reuse it every time you run one.

Step 7: Promote Your Instagram Giveaway

Promotion is the difference between a giveaway with 10 entries and one with 10,000. Building it is maybe a quarter of the job. Getting it seen is the other three quarters.

Run these together, not one at a time:

• Tease it before launch. Post a “something’s coming” story a day or two ahead. Shanti Soy did this at just 1,000 followers and built real anticipation before the launch even landed. Strong engagement in those first few hours signals momentum to the algorithm.
• Put the link in your bio. Point your giveaway landing page URL there with a link-in-bio tool, and tell people in every post to tap it to enter.
• Add an exit popup on your site. KnivesShipFree turned over 8% of leaving visitors into contest entries with an exit-intent popup, per an OptinMonster case study. That’s traffic you were about to lose anyway.
• Email your list. Send at least twice: once at launch, once the day before it closes. Anker’s giveaway emails are a clean model to copy.
• Post Stories and Reels daily. Add a link sticker to your Stories, and post one Reel at launch and one on the final day. Reels get reshared about 4.5 billion times a day, according to Sprout Social citing Meta data.
• List it in contest directories. Hardly anyone bothers with these, which is exactly why they’re worth it. Submit to Sweepstakes Advantage, Contestgirl, Online-Sweepstakes.com, iSweepstakes, and True Sweepstakes for free reach.

A couple of extras. A paid boost on your announcement post can start at about $5, which is nothing for the extra eyes. And tag every promo link with a UTM so you can see later which channel actually pulled its weight.

Step 8: Pick and Announce the Winner

How you pick the winner is a trust signal, so don’t do it in the dark. Draw a verified winner in RafflePress from real, confirmed entries, and be seen doing it.

Then announce it in your feed and your Stories, and save it to a highlight so it doesn’t disappear. A public, verified draw quietly tells everyone who didn’t win that the whole thing was fair, and that’s exactly what gets them to enter your next one.

There’s more on this in our guide to how to announce a giveaway winner.

How to Gain (and Keep) Followers From Your Giveaway

New followers only count if they stay, and this is where most giveaways quietly fall apart. Getting a thousand followers is easy. Still having most of them a month later is the actual skill.

Here’s why giveaway growth beats the shortcuts.

Bought followers never like anything, never comment, never buy. They’re a bigger number and nothing else.

A giveaway brings real people, ones who chose to follow because they wanted your prize and, with any luck, your product. The same mechanics grow your likes and engagement too, because these are people who actually interact.

Risata Wines is a good one for showing that reach. Its “tag your summer crew” giveaway pulled over 3,000 comments, 130+ shares, and 900+ reactions.

If there’s one mistake I see wreck more giveaways than any other, it’s going quiet the second the winner’s announced. Those new followers need a reason to stick around in that first week, or they drift off.

Retention is where the work actually pays off:

• Email new subscribers the same day the giveaway ends. Wait even a few days and they’ve forgotten they ever entered.
• Send a consolation offer. Everyone who didn’t win gets a small discount or freebie. It turns a loss into a first purchase.
• Make an exclusive offer within 48 hours. The window where they remember you is short, so use it.
• Segment giveaway subscribers into their own sequence. They’re colder than people who found you organically, so nurture them separately.
• Run a welcome-content week. Show them what they actually followed you for.

Then check back at the 7-day mark. If you’ve lost more than 10 to 15% of the followers you gained, that’s your prize telling you it pulled the wrong crowd. Fix the prize before the next run.

A giveaway that grabs emails feeds your list too, and that list can become a growth engine you run again and again, which is exactly what our guide to a giveaway to grow your email list gets into.

How to Run an Instagram Photo Contest

An Instagram photo contest is a giveaway where entrants submit their own images, usually built around your product or a theme.

A photo contest makes people work to enter, and that’s the whole point. Getting someone to make and submit their own image weeds out the prize hunters and leaves you with people who genuinely care.

On the plus side, it fills your feed with content you can reuse, and every entry lands in front of that person’s own followers.

Here’s how it stacks up against the other creative formats:

Contest type	Best for	Effort to enter
Photo contest	UGC and authentic content	High
Caption contest	Playful engagement	Low
Comment to enter	Quick audience insight	Very low
Hashtag challenge	Reach and trend-riding	Medium

All the rules from Step 4 still apply, plus one that’s specific to photos: don’t ask people to tag anyone who isn’t actually in the shot. Keep your “not sponsored by Instagram” line and your data note in there too.

To run one in RafflePress, add the Submit an Image action from the Actions tab under Get More Traffic. You can set its entry value, make it mandatory, and allow daily entries.

When I added it on my test site, the photos collected under RafflePress » Giveaways » Image Entries, ready to review.

You also get to choose how the winner’s picked. A random draw is the simplest. Audience voting turns every entrant into someone chasing votes from their friends, which spreads it further, but it’s more to manage than a straight draw.

Bebang HaloHalo ran a story-mention photo contest and saw 25% sales growth on zero ad spend, per an EasyPromos case study.

Ben & Jerry’s has leaned on UGC photo contests for years for the same reason: what their fans make beats anything the brand could shoot itself.

How to Run a Giveaway With a Partner

Teaming up with someone else doubles your reach in a single move, because their audience meets yours and yours meets theirs. You’ve got two ways to do it, an influencer giveaway or a brand collaboration, and they work a little differently.

Influencer Giveaways

An influencer giveaway drops your prize in front of an audience that already trusts whoever’s promoting it, and that trust is the entire point. About 61% of people say they trust a recommendation from a friend, family member, or influencer over a brand’s own posts, per a Matter Communications survey.

Go this route when you want a fast spike in reach and followers. A sponsored post builds slower, steadier awareness. A giveaway is a burst. Pick the one you need.

On money, treat these as rough ranges, not fixed rates.

Micro-influencers (5K to 50K followers) often run $100 to $300 a post plus product, and some will do it for the product alone. Mid-tier ones (50K to 500K) tend to sit between $500 and $5,000 a post. Whatever the fee, always throw in the product too.

To find them, dig through relevant hashtags, search niche blogs, or use something like Buzzsumo.

I like inviting the influencer to launch the giveaway with a takeover or guest post on your own channels.

Keep it above board, because a sloppy influencer giveaway reads as a scam fast:

• Disclose the partnership everywhere. The FTC requires #ad or #sponsored on every promotional post, including Stories.
• Post the verified winner publicly. Draw it in RafflePress and show it.
• Keep entry actions reasonable. Fifteen follow requirements reads as follower-farming, not a giveaway.

Brand Collaborations

A brand collaboration pairs you with a non-competing brand to run one giveaway together. Get it right and both audiences grow. Get it wrong and one side just ignores the prize.

Vet a partner on three things:

• Their audience overlaps yours
• Their offer complements rather than competes with yours
• They’re roughly your size and momentum.

Start with brands you already follow and like. Look at their recent posts, how often they promote, and whether their audience actually shows up.

The prize has to appeal to both sides, or it’s lopsided from the start. Think a product from each brand, a gift card good at either store, a limited-edition item, or a service from both.

Krave Beauty and ZitSticka did exactly this with a co-branded bundle and pulled over 4,000 entries.

Agree the cadence up front.

A launch day, a mid-way nudge, and a final-day push from both accounts, plus a shared folder of swipe copy and images. Run it 7 to 10 days, label it “in partnership with [Brand]” on the page, in emails, and on social, and give each partner their own UTM so you can see who actually drove traffic.

RafflePress handles co-hosted giveaways fine, since one page can carry both brands’ entry actions.

How to Measure Your Giveaway

You measure a giveaway to learn what to change next time, not to make a nice-looking report. The first thing I look at is the entry-source breakdown in RafflePress, which shows exactly which actions drove the entries.

That’s where the real lessons hide. In SeedProd’s Black Friday giveaway, refer-a-friend was the standout, which is why it reached so far past the existing audience. If one action is carrying most of the weight in your report, lean into it next time.

Then hold the result up against the goal you set in Step 1:

• Chasing followers? Look at follower delta, not total entries.
• Chasing sales? Look at orders during and just after the giveaway.
• Chasing emails? Look at new subscribers and how many stuck around a month later.

And jot down one thing you’d change before it slips your mind: the prize, the length, the entry actions, or the promotion. That one note is what makes the next giveaway better than this one.

Instagram Giveaway FAQ

Are Instagram giveaways legal?

Yes, as long as you follow the rules. You need a disclaimer that the giveaway isn’t sponsored by Instagram, at least one free way to enter, and clear eligibility terms. If every entry method requires a purchase, it tips into lottery territory, which is regulated. A tool like RafflePress can generate a compliant rules page for you.

How many followers do I need to run an Instagram giveaway?

Fewer than you’d think. A giveaway grows a small account precisely because tag-a-friend entries and Story shares reach people who don’t follow you yet. Shanti Soy teased one at just 1,000 followers. Start with the audience you have and let the entry actions do the expanding.

How do I stop fake entries?

Host it on your own site with a tool that verifies entries. RafflePress checks each action before it credits it and flags duplicates, so one person can’t enter dozens of times with throwaway accounts. A giveaway run from an Instagram caption alone gives you no way to catch this.

Do I need a business or creator account?

You don’t need one to run a giveaway, but it helps. A business or creator account gives you link stickers in Stories, audience insights, and the option to boost your announcement post, all of which make promotion easier.

Ready to Run a Giveaway That Sticks?

Every giveaway that leaks makes the same mistake: the wrong prize pulls in the wrong people. Get the prize and the setup right, and the followers you gain are the ones who actually wanted to find you in the first place.

You’ve got the goal, the prize, the setup, and the promotion plan. You can get started with RafflePress and have your first Instagram giveaway live before the day is out.

If you want to keep going, these giveaway guides will help you build on what you’ve learned in this post:

• Instagram giveaway examples
• 20 contest promotion ideas
• Do giveaways increase sales?

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