Hey everyone, it's Alex Tooby here from alextooby.com and welcome back to my YouTube channel.
Today we're going to be talking about how to run a successful Instagram giveaway or
contest on your account.
Using Instagram giveaways can help you really improve your engagement, your follower account,
and even things like your email subscribers or blog readers.
But before we get started, I want you to enter my giveaway.
So I'm giving away access to my two Instagram marketing courses, hashtag hero and infamous
to influential, which is a $456 retail value, and it's going to go to one lucky winner.
Now this giveaway is super mega easy to enter.
All you need to do is click the subscribe button below, and that's it.
So I'll give you a couple seconds right now to go ahead and click it.
[clicking noises]
so if that subscriber button is now gray and not red, that means you're subscribed to my
channel and you're entered to win access to my Instagram marketing courses.
I will be choosing a winner on Monday, September 17th so stay tuned for that.
I will contact you if you are the winner and I will post it on my social media, who the
winner was so that everybody knows that the Instagram contest is concluded.
So again, tap that subscribe button if you want to enter.
And now let's head into the video.
So the first thing you need to consider when running an Instagram giveaway is what is your
goal of the giveaway?
Is it to get more engagement?
Is it to increase your followers?
Is it to increase your email subscribers, maybe your Facebook group, et cetera.
You need to decide specifically what your goal is so that we can frame our Instagram
contests around that.
Now, the most common goal that I see is generally gaining more followers, which is totally fine,
but I personally like to focus on gaining more email subscribers.
So the reason why I think that that's more important is because in the long run they're
more valuable.
I own my email list 100% I do not own my Instagram following.
And you don't own your Instagram following either.
So you know, you never know what's going to happen in the future.
You never know if your account is going to get hacked or deleted or Instagram just decides
they're done and they shut down the whole system.
So having something like your email list is really, really important because like I said,
you own it and you have control over that unlike your social media following one, I
own my email list, which is more secure.
And two, once I have someone on my email list, I can send them a variety of emails and free
content to kind of build up my authority.
And from there I can get them to purchase my products and services a lot easier than
I can just trying to get them to purchase from Instagram.
So again, it's totally up to you.
Personally, I like to build email subscribers, but as you know for this particular giveaway
that I'm hosting right now, all I want you to do is subscribe to me on YouTube because
right now that's one of my goals is to grow my YouTube channel.
So again, number one is to decide on a goal.
Number two is to pick a relevant prize.
So for me, my audience is very much interested in learning more about Instagram.
So if I were to give them access to my, that is very relevant and it's something that they
would certainly want.
In contrast to that, if I were to say give away an iPad, I'm sure I would get a lot of
people entering my contest, but they wouldn't necessarily be my target market and I'd probably
attract people that are just trying to enter contest to win and not because they actually
care about me or my courses and things like that.
So make sure you pick a relevant prize that you think your audience is 100% going to benefit
from.
Number three is keep it simple.
So now that you've decided what your goal is, you've picked a prize.
Now you have to decide how do people enter my giveaway.
So again, for me it was as simple as you subscribing to my YouTube channel.
That's it.
Nice and simple because I don't want to push anyone away or discourage people from entering
because it's too complicated.
Now if your goal is to increase your followers, you might want to implement the standard Instagram
giveaway rules of like this photo, follow us and tag a friend in the comments.
Now, those are some simple tasks that people can do without too much issue.
Now, if you want more things like for someone to repost your photo or maybe create an Instagram
story with your giveaway image or something like that, I like to add those as extra entries
because I don't want to make it too hard for someone to enter the giveaway, like I said
earlier.
So if you want someone to disrupt the aesthetic of their feed by posting your image on their
feet, then you want to add that as an extra entry.
Because I know personally, I don't like posting other people's photos on my feed and I know
a lot of Instagrammers don't either.
So by adding that as one of your rules, chances are good, you're going to decrease the amount
of people that enter your contest.
So make sure you keep it simple.
Number four, don't make it last too long.
So the ideal length of an Instagram giveaway, in my opinion, is three to seven days.
You don't want it to be like a two week, two month long thing because people will just
forget about it or lose interest.
You want there to be some scarcity and some urgency for people to enter right away.
If you have a large enough following, you could actually do a 24 hour giveaway if you
expected to get a lot of entrance and it was a really awesome prize and that could be really
fun.
But if you have a small account, chances are good, you won't actually get that many entries.
So again, I would stick to three to seven days.
Number five is promote, promote, promote.
You can't just post a single giveaway image on Instagram and expect to get thousands of
entries.
You need to make sure that you're top of mind of people that you're cross promoting your
giveaway.
So say you're putting it on your Instagram story, you're posting about it on Facebook,
maybe you're sending out an email about it.
You need to make sure that your audience knows that this is happening.
Because as you know with algorithm, not all of your followers are going to see your posts.
So make sure you're switching it up and promoting it in any way that you can.
Number six, choose a winner, fair and square.
So once your contest has completed, you're going to have to choose a winner.
Now these people went out of their way to enter your contest and you benefited from
it.
So it's best that you choose a winner as fairly as possible.
Now, there has been terrible people out there who you know, hosted, give away and get thousands
and thousands of subscribers and then simply give the prize to one of their friends, or
don't give the prize out at all.
Now you really don't want to be that person because one, why the heck would you?
And two, you're going to lose the trust of your audience.
So just be as fair as you can and give the prize to a deserving person.
So depending on what the criteria was for your giveaway and how many people entered,
this could be easy or a little more complex.
So for example, if you required that someone comment on your posts to enter your giveaway,
you could go ahead and check out how many people commented.
Say it was only 15 you could easily type out the Instagram usernames of the people who
commented or even copy and paste them from your desktop viewer.
From there you can enter them into a random picker website.
Would you simply just have to Google it?
There are a ton of them.
Or if you got a ton of comments, like say you got 500 comments, you could just view
that via your Instagram posts, see how many comments you got.
Exactly.
And then you could find a random number generator put that you want a number chosen between
one and 523 or whatever it was.
See the number picker chose number 29 you would have to go back to your comments, count
out 29 comments and then that is your winner.
Now from there, you're going to have to check that that person did all of your other criteria.
Are they following you and did they like your post?
Or again, whatever it was that your criteria was, make sure you check that they did it
and that they're deserving of the prize.
So if anything, this is probably the most difficult part of hosting an Instagram giveaway,
but it is one of the most important.
So like I said, you don't want people to feel weird or jipped or scammed by your Instagram
giveaway.
So do your very best to choose a winner, fair and square.
No, those are the most important elements of running an Instagram giveaway.
But there are two other things that you should consider.
So number seven, be careful with the hashtags you choose for your giveaway.
A lot of people will make the mistake of using hashtags like hashtag giveaway or hashtag
contest, which attracts the wrong person.
Now there are people on Instagram that just scour hashtags like that and basically enter
any giveaway they possibly can because they're a fiend for winning these things.
Now, the problem with that is that they don't actually care about you.
They're not subscribing because they actually like what you post or interested in learning
more from you.
They simply just want to win the prize.
So definitely avoid generic hashtags like that and stick to hashtags that you normally
would use.
Hashtags that will attract your target market, that will attract people that are searching
for your product or service or that are searching for something within your niche.
Okay, so you don't really need to change a whole lot when it comes to your hashtag strategy
when hosting a giveaway.
So just keep that in mind.
And the last one is number eight, stay away from loop giveaways.
Now this is my personal opinion.
I know that loop giveaways are quite popular and some people may not agree with me, but
hear me out.
So if you don't know what a loop giveaway is, basically it's a group of people that
get together to host one massive giveaway.
Now I've seen loop giveaways with more than 30 people participating in it and the idea
is that the entrant has to follow all 30 people.
And like all 30 posts and most likely leave a comment on all 30 images as well.
So my number two of keep it simple.
This is the exact opposite of that.
You're basically asking your audience to jump through like burning hoops of fire to enter
your giveaway.
And for me it's just not fair to them.
It's too much effort and it doesn't need to be that complex.
Now the other thing about loop giveaways is that all 30 of those people who are participating
will put in $100 or you know, a certain amount of money, which actually ends up being quite
a large sum of money and they end up purchasing like a camera or a Michael Khors bag or a
drone or something like that.
And that leads me back to number three, which was pick a relevant prize.
So again, you don't want to be giving away a drone because that's going to attract people
from everywhere.
I want people who are interested in Instagram marketing, you might want people that are
interested in jewelry, someone else might want people that are interested in fitness
and giving away a drone.
Just because it doesn't actually go towards our bigger goal.
And yeah, it's just kind of silly to me.
And I think overall loop giveaways are big failure.
So not only is it a lot of work for your audience, the prize isn't relevant.
You're attracting the wrong people and it is known that once a loop giveaway ends, most
users lose a ton of followers because again, they just followed you to win this massive
prize.
So I would stay away from loop giveaways entirely.
If you're interested in the idea on a smaller scale, I'd say use about a max of three people
and make sure that you're all within the same niche or have a similar target market so that
you all benefit equally.
So that is my eight tips for hosting a successful Instagram giveaway or contest.
I hope you like them.
I hope you learned something new.
And don't forget to enter my giveaway by hitting the subscribe button below.
Like I said, if that button is gray and not red, then you're entered to win access to
my Instagram marketing courses, hashtag hero and infamous to influential.
So thanks again for watching.
And I'll see you next time.