Get Fans, Not Just Followers, With a Instagram Giveaway

What's your strategy for building your Instagram audience? Many profiles focus on the number of followers - they're desperate to break that 5k, 500k or 1 million ceiling. But in the long term, your Instagram will thrive or fail based on engagement, not just numbers.

There are now 1 billion registered users on Instagram, and it continues to grow. And as the platform looks for new ways to make money, your feed is filling up with more ads and recommended posts. Long story short: if someone just clicks "follow" on your page, they may never see your posts again.

So how can you get active fans instead of passive followers? How do you get users to like, comment, and share? One tried and tested method is an Instagram giveaway. In this post, we'll talk about how to do a giveaway on Instagram, how to get the most from an contest, what you can achieve, and what you should avoid.

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Get your Followers Talking

The best Instagram giveaways start with an open-ended question. Share a post and ask your followers to comment with their ideas, opinions, and stories. Here's a cute example from a babywear company, which asked parents to share stories of special memories and clothes:

Or you could run a contest where followers can pick the prize. You've seen the Insta craze for stylish water bottles - gotta get that hydration! This brand ran an Instagram giveaway where followers had to comment with the water bottle design they'd like to win.

We love giveaways like this. The photo has a neat design, and explains the whole Instagram giveaway without using too much text. When you organize a giveaway, make sure your posts and Stories look tempting. Show off the prize, and make it seem exclusive and valuable.

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Bring a Friend

You can ask your followers to mention a friend in the comments. This is one big advantage of Instagram: other platforms, such as Facebook, don't allow tagging in giveaways. Just make sure that the Instagram giveaway is something with wide appeal - you don't want to be responsible for users spamming their friends.

For example... food seems like a safe choice! This Papa John's franchise gave away 5 deliveries of their Cinnamon Pull Apart bread. Their followers just had to tag the friend they like to snack with. And that big, glossy photo was carefully designed to trigger cravings. We're getting hungry just looking at it.

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Mix your media

Remember that most of your followers are using several different social networks. And chances are, you're posting in multiple places too. Use a giveaway to bounce users between your different social media profiles and content.

Sound complicated? It doesn't have to be! Here's a simple example from a leading French cookware brand. They shared a cooking video on their app. Then, they asked their Instagram followers to answer a question about the video, to win an automatic food processor.

If you'd like to combine followers from your different socials, then try a multi-network giveaway. You'll get the same benefits for your online audience, without the hassle of organizing contests on each individual network.

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Now Follow Up

Of course, it's not enough to run a single giveaway and then forget about your followers. You need to keep the conversation going and maintain the relationship. Here are a few things to try:

• Run a giveaway series, with a weekly trivia contest or theme,=.

• Create puzzles for your followers. One simple method: share part of an image in your Stories. When followers find the full photo on your profile, they can enter the giveaway in the comments.

• Share live updates in your Stories: count down to the prize draw, announce winners, and post their reaction.

• Ask your followers what the next giveaway should be.

Here's a great example of following up, from a craft liquor distillery. First, they shared a giveaway with tickets to an exclusive event, and asked followers to tag their friends:

Then they used their Stories to share winners' reactions, drinks and menus from the event, and other guests' snaps:

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Giveaway Implementation Options

As we mentioned above, Instagram giveaways are a fantastic way to build engagement, followers and brand recognition. The first thing you will have to decide when creating your giveaway is the implementation of it. Is it better for you brand to go with a native Instagram giveaway or use a 3rd party app.

The benefits of using a 3rd party app like VYPER is that you have much more flexibility on how you incentives your social actions. The other additional benefit is that you can actually collect the users email etc.

Ideally you want to leverage a lead as much as possible so by using a 3rd party app you can reward multiple actions such as follow, tag friends, upload and tag or even a regram. If you chose to use a native giveaway, these are limited but you might have a higher engagement as there is not as much effort required on the participants end. So before you plan out your giveaway, decide if you want to run it through a 3rd party app or natively on Instagram.

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One Last Thing

Instagram giveaways are a fantastic tool: they're quick, affordable, and effective. But there are limits to what you can do. Social networks are cracking down on spam accounts right now. Make sure you know the rules, or risk having your account suspended.

Here's what you can't do with an Instagram giveaway:

• Require users to follow you. There's no way to confirm who follows you as part of a comments contest.

• Require users' friends to follow you. Again, there's no way to confirm followers - and asking users to spam their friends is an unpopular move.

• Require users to repost your photos and Stories

Of course, you can invite followers to do all these things. And if you're offering great prizes, many people will choose to follow you, all on their own. But you can't push or demand. And as we said at the beginning… that kind of forced engagement is no good for your audience in the end. When you create a genuine connection, then your online users become more than just followers. They become fans. And that's when your audience will really start to grow.