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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Running a giveaway on Instagram is a great way to boost your audience and increase brand awareness. But how do you know what does and doesn’t work? Researching Instagram giveaway examples can provide great insight into what works for other brands’ digital marketing strategies.
So in this article, we’ll share the best Instagram giveaway examples so you can try them out for your own business and boost leads and conversions.
But first, let’s look at what an Instagram giveaway is.
An Instagram giveaway is an Instagram marketing strategy where brands give away a product or service to one or many participants. Typically, brands require entrants to perform specific tasks to qualify for a chance to win the giveaway prize.
Some of those tasks could be to:
Brands can then choose a winner from the people who enter successfully.
Instagram giveaways can help you get excellent results from your social media marketing strategy. Besides boosting your marketing goals, here are some other reasons for running an Instagram giveaway for your business:
Furthermore, your contest’s goal will define the actions you’ll need fans to take to enter. So think about what you can ask participants to do to meet your goals.
For instance, you could ask Instagram users to refer friends or visit your Instagram profile to get new followers.
Or, to improve website traffic, you can ask your target audience to leave a comment on a blog post or visit a product page in return for more entries.
However, when creating any giveaway, you should consider your fans’ likes and dislikes. There’s little point in giving away something your fans aren’t don’t like.
So keep your contest prize ideas and methods of entering as relevant to your audience as possible.
Running an Instagram giveaway is challenging if you don’t know where to start. Luckily, many places offer free templates and graphics you can customize, such as Canva, the popular image editing website.
You can also use a giveaway tool like RafflePress, which includes pre-made giveaway templates for Instagram.
The template automatically populates your giveaway widget with actions to:
It’s also easy to add bonus entry methods with a few clicks.
Now we’ve covered the basics, how about we look at some of the best Instagram contest examples for you to try?
Below you’ll find some excellent examples of Instagram Giveaways and marketing campaigns.
Our first offering is a classic example of what we call news-jacking. Newsjacking is when a brand or business uses trending news topics to boost engagement and attract potential customers.
In this example, a famous coffee brand uses the news of a virus spread as an excuse to promote its brand with a giveaway. And their main goal is to grow their audience.
To be in with a chance to win the contest and get extra entries, fans should take the following actions:
If you were to run this type of contest using RafflePress, you could use the Instagram giveaway template. It comes with actions to visit your Instagram account and view an Instagram post or video.
Next up, we have a giveaway post that promotes a new product range. It includes a slideshow of 4 product versions, with the chance to win 1 by picking a favorite.
The fans have to take the following actions:
You can create these types of Instagram contests in RafflePress by choosing the Instagram template suggested above and including the Surveys and Polls entry action.
This action lets you set up a quick poll where people can easily vote on their favorite. Just make sure you include an image with all prize options labeled clearly.
This cute Instagram contest example uses the start of a new season to promote their account and products. They’re giving fans a chance to win a seasonal edition of their product in return for engagement on their giveaway post.
Fans need to tag a friend to enter.
Innovative brands can capitalize on this idea by turning it into a social media photo contest with viral refer-a-friend entries. You’d need to ask people to post a picture with your product in different seasons and refer friends for extra entries.
There’s no rule saying you can’t have more than 1 winner of your giveaway. In fact, including multiple winners can help you promote different products.
In this bright example, a tattooist gives followers 3 chances to win, with the first prize being a free tattoo.
Fans can enter by:
Because this contest is all about building a following, the Instagram contest template from RafflePress would be ideal.
You could even go a step further by creating a branded hashtag to keep track of and promote your contest.
Next is an excellent example of a business using the popularity of a product to grow its account. The product is high value and popular due to the game’s impending launch.
Big-ticket items such as this are highly desirable, so they will drive tons of entries. It induces the fear of missing out on people desperate to get their hands on it.
Because this is a simple like, tag, and comment contest, it’s easy to recreate in RafflePress with the social and refer-a-friend actions.
This action saves your contest post from being clogged with comment spam and helps you keep everything organized.
Savvy marketers know the best time to run a promotion is when there’s a public holiday or event. The holiday in question will be at the top of peoples’ minds, making relevant content more noticeable.
In this case, the holiday is St. Patrick’s Day, and the brand uses it to promote its sticker business by giving away a ton of stickers.
Even though it’s a simple prize, it’s an effective way to reward loyal followers and grow your following simultaneously. You could even throw in a gift card to increase the value.
Next up is a contest from a larger brand that features its products as part of a prize bundle. It’s a great example of 2 related brands working together to promote their businesses. And it works because it taps into the audience of both brands for a greater reach.
Fans need to follow the 2 brands and tag a friend in the comments to win this bundle of breakfast goodies.
In this example, the beauty brand Benefit Cosmetics teams up with a relevant brand to raise awareness for its products. Again, they’re using their combined audiences to run their contest and promote it to a broader audience.
To enter, users need to complete the following actions:
An easy way to improve the quality of contest entrants for this giveaway they could use RafflePress to accept user-generated content.
By asking people to upload photos of their best beauty looks, they could feature the content on their websites to gain extra traffic.
For this contest, entrants can choose any bike as the prize. This giveaway idea encourages people to visit the product website and browse the opportunities, resulting in more traffic.
Furthermore, the entry options encourage friend referrals to reach a wider audience by:
You could quickly improve engagement in this contest by including a question or poll asking for their favorite choice.
Sometimes reaching a milestone can be a great excuse to run a contest and celebrate. And this brand’s giveaway post does just that for achieving a 7k follower milestone. In return, they’re offering 2 surprise boxes, which improves the chances of people entering.
Let’s face it; a surprise is much more tempting. What if you miss out on something extraordinary?
If you’re feeling extra generous, you could include an automatic entry option, which lets visitors enter instantly without further actions.
You may have noticed there are hashtags for everything nowadays. And the same can be said for giveaways. Instagram has a giveaway hashtag specifically for Wednesdays called #winitwednesday.
Regular giveaway hashtags can increase the reach of your contests. This is down to the hashtag being so popular that people actively seek it to find superb competitions to enter.
This brand uses a hashtag contest to promote its product and increase contest entries. They also encourage engagement by asking people to explain why they want the product.
You can even use this tactic to gather market research.
Ever thought about working with an influencer to promote your brand? Doing so can open you to a whole new audience of engaged potential customers.
Even better, because influencers have significant ‘influence’ over their followers’ purchase choices, it’s an excellent opportunity to increase product sales.
In this Instagram giveaway post example, a brand partnered with an influencer to promote their products, resulting in tons of engagement and traffic to both parties.
Offering cash as a prize for your contest can be a quick win for all businesses. There are no fancy product shots to take. And money is easy enough to transfer via PayPal and so on.
And to ensure that everyone’s entered correctly, you can use the entry verification methods included in RafflePress.
They’re helpful for high-value prizes like cash to ensure all entrants have followed the rules. You can learn more about verifying actions in the documentation here.
Instagram like and comment contests are probably some of the most popular giveaway ideas on Instagram. It’s easy for people to enter and requires minimal effort on the brands’ part.
Yet managing and verifying all those likes and comments can be difficult if you attract tons of entries.
This Instagram giveaway example generated almost 6,000 likes and almost as many comments. That’s a whole lot of people to qualify.
You could use RafflePress to run your like and comment Instagram contest to make things easier.
Just include the action for users to visit your Instagram post and invent your own, asking them to leave a link to their comment.
The great thing about taking this approach is all the entries will be right inside the entry management dashboard. This makes it easier to see at-a-glance who has qualified correctly.
Then you can use the built-in random winner picker to announce the winner of your contest.
You can use a similar approach to the previous Instagram contest with this example. In this giveaway post, users are asked to tag a friend in the comments and follow 2 different Instagram accounts to enter.
With RafflePress, you can ask users to visit each Instagram account. After encouraging people to tag a friend in the comments, you can ask them to link to their comment using the “Invent Your Own” entry action.
That way, everything’s all in one place.
There are many ways to run competitions on Instagram and plenty of tools to make the whole process easier. A giveaway tool takes the pain out of organizing your contest’s details and offers a way to keep everything all in one place.
If you’re interested, we’ve compared a number of the best contest tools in our comparison article: Rafflecopter vs. Gleam vs. RafflePress.
From comparing all the pros and cons, we settled on RafflePress as the best tool for creating an online contest.
RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin around right now. And with its modern interface, drag-and-drop giveaway builder, and viral giveaway templates (Including an Instagram contest template), you can create any contest.
Built-in social actions help you grow your email list, website traffic, and social media followers with viral contests.
We’ve also put together a step-by-step guide for running an Instagram giveaway with RafflePress.
You might also be wondering how to track your contests on Instagram. And RafflePress has this covered too. Because your promotions are in one central dashboard, it’s easy to manage multiple giveaways all at once.
You can quickly check the number of entries and end dates and draw winners for your contests.
But if you want to go a step further, you can use a WordPress analytics tool like MonsterInsights to track visits to giveaway landing pages, referral traffic, and website activity.
And with MonsterInsights dashboard reporting, you can see the results right from within WordPress. Then you can see which strategies have the best results for your promotions, which you can use in future giveaways.
Check out this MonsterInsights review to learn how it works.
Yes. Running an Instagram giveaway is legal. However, you should check any laws that might apply in your area to stay compliant. You should also include the rules and terms of eligibility when you run Instagram giveaways.
Here is an Instagram giveaway rules disclaimer you can edit, copy and paste into your next giveaway:
“In accordance with Instagram’s rules, this giveaway is not associated with Instagram in any way and is not sponsored, endorsed, or administered by Instagram. By entering, you confirm that you are 13+ years old, you agree with Instagram’s terms of use, and you release Instagram from any responsibility.“
Your giveaway duration depends on the type of Instagram giveaway you run. Most giveaways last around 7 days to give users plenty of time to enter but keep a sense of urgency.
While it’s possible to run multiple giveaways simultaneously, it’s advisable to space them out to maintain excitement and anticipation among your followers. Running too many giveaways at once may cause your audience to lose interest, reducing the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.
To maximize engagement, launch your giveaway on days and times when your audience is most active on Instagram. Use Instagram Insights or other analytics tools to identify peak engagement times for your followers. In general, weekdays during lunchtime or evenings tend to have higher engagement rates.
To optimize your giveaway for search engines, include relevant keywords in your giveaway post’s caption and hashtags. Additionally, when promoting the giveaway on your blog or website, use these keywords in your content, meta tags, and image alt tags to improve visibility on search engine results.
And that’s it!
We’ve shared successful Instagram giveaway examples you can use for your promotions in this article.
If you’d like to find more places to promote your website, check out our list of the best online sweepstakes websites here. You may also find the following guides helpful:
You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for more great content.
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this information was really great i loved it sooo much will definitely be implementing some of these ideas to build my business. thank you
We’re so glad to hear that Rebecca. Good luck with the growth of your business.
thanks for giving tips Instagram Giveaways i like this informative post.if you know about giveaway ideas for business please visit
Very helpful tips. Thank you