How to make your Instagram giveaway successful

Giveaways are the best way to grow your following and deliver results for brands, but they take work to do right.

If you haven't started your giveaway yet, we've put together some tips on how to start your giveaway right. Once your giveaway is in progress, the quick guide below will help make your giveaway a success.

Interact with your followers

While your giveaway is active you should interact with your followers and encourage them to share the giveaway with their friends.

Promote, promote, promote!

Just posting your giveaway isn’t good enough--you have to promote it to reach the most people. Here are some things you can do:

• Tell your followers about your upcoming giveaway in advance to get them excited about it and know when to look for it.
• Share your giveaway on your other social profiles like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.
• Use stories before, during, and after your giveaway to engage your audience.
• If you have a blog or an email list promote your giveaway to this audience as well.
• Share giveaway’s entries page so your followers can verify their entry and share it with their friends.
• Continue to post during your giveaway with things like, "You still have time to enter the giveaway to win XYZ!" Then tell them when your giveaway post was so they can find it.

View your success metrics

See all your giveaway stats like New Followers, Entries, and Engagement from the app – all in real-time.

Pick a fair & valid winner

When you're ready to end your giveaway, simply tap "Pick Winner" in the app to end your giveaway and we'll select a verified random winner who has completed all of your entry criteria. You can draw additional winners if needed.

We recommend sharing the link to your giveaway with your followers in the winner announcement post so they know the winner was chosen fairly, at random, and validated by a 3rd party authority. We share details about how random winners are chosen fairly here.

Getting better all the time

The secret to success with giveaways as with anything is to continuously improve and get better all the time. Pay attention to what works, what doesn't, and experiment with new methods. If you find something new that works or have suggestions for this guide we'd love to hear them!

More tips on running killer giveaways...

Hungry for more tips on running great Instagram giveaways? Well, you're in luck. We wrote an epic 12,000-word guide on running Instagram giveaways here!