How To Run a Successful Social Media Giveaway
Hosting giveaways on Instagram and TikTok is a great way to generate organic engagement and grow your brand’s following, especially if you don’t have the money to allocate to ads. I have run hundreds of giveaways for brands in various industries over the years on nearly every social media platform and have had a lot of success. Now I'm going to walk you through how your brand can achieve success with your next social media giveaway.
Over the years I have seen many brands think that one big grand prize is all it takes to create a huge frenzy of engagement and new followers, but in my experience I have found that you are better off giving advertising several smaller prizes instead one big prize. When people see that there will only be one winner they often times won’t bother entering because they see the chances of winning as very slim. Now, if you announce that there are going to be 10 winners, people are more likely to be more motivated to enter because there’s a higher perceived chance of winning.
I have run many giveaways where each prize is worth less than $25 USD retail value, which doesn't seem like much, but because I announced that multiple winners were going to be chosen, I have been able to amass thousands of entries and new followers for brands.
Another great tactic that always works well on Instagram and TikTok is utilizing the “tag a friend to enter” giveaway format. It’s really important to make the barrier of entry as low as possible. You shouldn’t make people jump through a bunch of hoops in order to enter a giveaway. I have seen many brands host giveaways where they require people to like a post, follow the brand (and their giveaway partners), tag several friends, leave a clever comment, etc. and those are almost always the types of giveaways that generate the least number of entries.
The main reason to not require people to have to do several things in order to enter your giveaway is that people don’t have the time (or desire) to read through a paragraph of instructions and then have to do several things in order to enter a giveaway. And if you can avoid it, try not to ask people to click on an external link to have them enter a form on your website. Most people don’t want to leave the Instagram or TikTok app while they’re scrolling through their feed. Additionally, you’re competing against tons of other posts and giveaways that all have call to actions (CTA). Attention spans are dwindling, so focus on grabbing a person’s attention and making it as easy as possible to enter your giveaway.
Bottom line: Keep your contest copy short and have your CTA appear within the first couple sentences of your contest copy. I always like to begin a giveaway post caption with something like this: “GIVEAWAY ALERT! Want to win X for you and a friend? To enter, tag a friend in the comments section of this post. That’s it!” Additionally, I always encourage people to enter more than once, but remind them that they have to tag a new person each time they comment on the post or else their entries won’t be counted. This helps create a lot more visibility for your giveaway since the average contest entrant will tag multiple (and different) people to have a better shot of winning. The tag a friend model definitely helps push the desired snowball effect, which inevitably results in more contest entries, more visibility and ultimately, more engagement and new followers.
Below is an example of a ‘tag a friend’ giveaway I ran last September for my client SKF Bearings, which resulted in over 4.2k entries and over 1.5k new followers.
