13 Amazing Instagram Giveaway Examples to Try Now

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. 

So in this article, we’ll share our favorite Instagram contest examples so you can try them out for your own business, and reach the same level of success.

But first, let’s take a look at how running giveaways on Instagram work.

How Do Instagram Giveaways Work?

You can make an Instagram contest work in any number of ways. And there’s no right or wrong way to do it. How your contest will look largely depends on what you want to achieve for your business.

Here’s a few reasons why you might want to do an Instagram giveaway:

• Increase your Instagram followers
• Improve engagement with your fans
• Send more traffic to your website
• Grow your email subscribers
• Promote a specific product or service
• Reward loyal fans and brand evangelists

Furthermore, the goal of your contest will define the actions you’ll need fans to take to enter. So think about what you can ask participants to do that will result in meeting your goals.

For instance, to increase your followers, you could ask people to refer a friend or visit your Instagram profile. Or to improve website traffic, you can ask them 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 take the likes and dislikes of your fans into account. There’s little point in giving away something your fans aren’t interested in.

So keep your contest prize ideas and methods of entering as relevant to your audience as possible.

Now let’s explore how to do a successful giveaway on Instagram.

How Do I Do A Giveaway on Instagram?

There’s a ton of 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.

And 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, you can create any kind of contest. 

Even better 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 here.

How to Track Instagram Giveaways

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.

From there, you can quickly check the number of entries, 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.

Now we’ve covered the basics, how about we look at some examples for you to try.

13 Examples of Instagram Giveaways to Try

Below you’ll find some excellent examples of Instagram Giveaways and ideas to use for your account.

1. News-jacking Instagram Contest Example

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 their 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:

• Like the post
• Tag a friend in the comments
• Leave a comment
• Share the post in their Instagram story (optional)

If you were to run this type of contest using RafflePress, you could use the Grow Your Instagram Following template. It comes with actions to visit your Instagram account and to view an Instagram post or video.

2. Pick A Favorite Product Instagram Giveaway

Next up, we have a contest example that promotes a product range. The post includes a slideshow of 4 different versions of the product and gives people the chance to win 1 out of the 4 by picking their favorite.

The fans have to take the following actions:

• Follow 2 brand Instagram accounts
• Like the post
• Comment with their favorite version of the product
• Tag some friends
• Repost the contest as a story (optional)

You can create this type of giveaway in RafflePress by choosing the Instagram template as 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.

3. Seasonal Instagram Giveaway Example

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 contest post.

Fans need to simply tag a friend to enter.

Smart brands can capitalize on this idea by turning it into a social media photo contest with viral refer-a-friend entries. All you’d need is to ask people to post a picture with your product in different seasons and refer friends for extra entries.

4. Instagram Contest With Multiple Winners

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.

To enter fans need to:

• Follow the brand account
• Like the post
• Tag 3 friends

Because this contest is all about building a following, the Grow Your Instagram Following template would be ideal.

You could even go a step further by creating a branded hashtag to keep track of and promote your contest.

5. Trending Product Instagram Contest Example

Next is an excellent example of a business using the popularity of a product to grow their account. The product is high value and popular due to the impending launch of the game included. 

Big-ticket items such as this are highly desirable so they will drive tons of entries. What’s more, it induces the fear of missing out on those people who are 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.

6. Holiday Giveaway on Instagram

Smart 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 their 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 at the same time.

7. Product Feature Instagram Giveaway Idea

Next up is a contest from a larger brand that features their products as part of a bundle of prizes. 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.

For a chance to win this bundle of breakfast goodies, fans need to follow the 2 brands featured and tag a friend in the comments.

8. High-Value Beauty Instagram Contest Example

In this example, the beauty brand Benefit Cosmetics team up with a relevant brand to raise awareness for their 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:

• Follow both brand accounts
• Like the contest post
• Tag 3 friends and each brand in the comments
• Share the post to their Instagram feed via stories (optional)

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 a photo of their best beauty looks, they could feature the content on their websites to gain extra traffic. 

9. Choose Your Prize Instagram Competition

For this contest, entrants get the option of choosing any bike of their choice as the prize. This giveaway idea encourages people to visit the product website and browse the opportunities on offer, resulting in more traffic.

Furthermore, the entry options encourage friend referrals to reach a wider audience by:

• Liking the post
• Following the brand accounts
• Tagging friends in the comments
• Reposting using the branded hashtag

You could quickly improve engagement in this contest by including a question or poll asking for their favorite choice.

10. Instagram Follower Milestone Giveaway

Sometimes reaching a milestone can be a great excuse to run a contest and celebrate. And this brand 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 awesome?

If you’re feeling extra generous, you could include an automatic entry option, which lets visitors enter instantly without any further actions needed.

11. Instagram Hashtag Promotion Contest

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 out in expectation of finding cool competitions to enter.

This brand uses a hashtag promotion to promote their 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.

12. Influencer Instagram Giveaway Idea

Ever thought about working with an influencer to promote your brand? Doing so can open you up 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 example, a brand clearly partnered with an influencer to promote their products, resulting in tons of engagement and traffic to both parties.

13. Instagram Cash Giveaway Example

And finally, 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 the likes of PayPal and so on.

And to ensure that everyone’s entered correctly, you can use the entry verification methods included in RafflePress.

They’re particularly 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.

And that’s it!

In this article, we’ve shared successful Instagram giveaway examples you can use for your promotions.

If you’d like to find more places to promote your website, check out our list of the best online sweepstakes websites here.

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