Instagram giveaways are often used to grow pages. But are giveaways damaging your page growth?
Followers or Sales?
Often you hear vanity metrics like “The giveaway gave us 6500 new followers”.
The most important questions are:
- Did the giveaway increase your sales?
- How many followers stopped following the page in 1, 3, 6 months?
- Did you increase your page Engagement Rate in the following month?
Types of Instagram giveaways
Not all giveaways damage Brands profiles.
The bad one: Very generic
The good one: Niche-Centric
The “generic giveaway” it’s bad for your brand!
For example, a Brand with an eCommerce website that sells 400€ shoes.
Imagine before the giveaway the account had 16K followers and getting 400 likes and 20 comments.
Buf after the giveaway, the brand got 40,000 followers!
But, the likes and comments per post got worst.
And the new followers did not boost sales growth in the short, mid and long term.
What these results tell us?
Generic giveaways attract “prize hunters” that don’t care about the business.
The giveaway increased may increase followers, but the engagement dropped. This tells Instagram’s algorithm that the content is not “useful”.
In that case, the posts are seen by fewer people less often and it’s harder to generate engagement and sales.
Summary of Generic Giveaways
- They increase your total number of followers but decrease the percentage of engaged followers
- This results in lower engagement for your posts
- Posts in your account being shown to fewer followers
- Which decreases the average number of likes and comments
- Which, in turn, makes authentic growth even harder
And, worst of all: generic giveaways attract people to your business who are less likely to buy from you. Why invest money in a “sales strategy” that doesn’t generate sales?
Effective Instagram giveaways
Not all Instagram giveaways are the same.
Niche-centric giveaways can attract real customers to your business.
- Offered to give away something specifically appealing to the audience she wants to attract
- Something that would not appeal to people who aren’t in her target audience
Instagram giveaways
Niche giveaways help grow the total followers and increase engagement at the same time.
For example, a Kitchen Brand is offering the last entry in a culinary course. The Brand can do form submit giveaways, get emails and then announce to the new email list that they opened 5 more spots for the next 48hours.
This creates urgency and a sense of reward but also generates business.
Generating business is more important. Analyze your Instagram. It’s very rare to get Brands Organic Stories!! Don’t sacrifice your Brands engagements for Swipe Ups.
