What Type of Instagram Giveaway Should You Run

Instagram giveaways are very popular, and they are a great way to draw attention to your account or brand. They will help boost awareness and engagement, improving the chances of your content being noticed by the Instagram algorithm.

Once you decided to run a giveaway, you need to consider some of the best practices to set your giveaway up for success. The very first thing you need to do is you need to know the goal of your giveaway. Are you doing it just to give back to your existing followers? Let's say you've reached 10,000 Instagram followers. Is it because you want to gain followers. Make that first and foremost so that way you know how to frame your giveaway.

After you decided on the end goal of the giveaway, you can start gathering ideas on what type of giveaway to run.

Here are a few types that you can choose from:

Like the post

This type of Instagram giveaway has a very low barrier to entry. All you have to do is like the post. This is as simple as it gets since it doesn't require doing anything else other than like the post. It would be great if you're not necessarily looking for new followers, but you just want to thank the followers you already have.

Comment on the post

It's also a straightforward type of giveaway. Usually, you would ask your audience a question related to the photo, for example, "What is your number one goal this month?". You can use this method if you want your audience to learn something about your brand and avoid people that are just hunting for giveaways and not really interested in your content.

Tag a friend in the comments

The next type of giveaway is where you have to tag a friend in a comment. This can be anywhere from tag one friend to where you have to specifically tag three friends to form a single entry. Make sure that it's clear whether additional tags give you more entries or not. This type of giveaway is one of the most effective ones when it comes to growing the number of followers. However, it's harder to keep track of all the participants, and you're also going to have people who tagged 3 friends in separate comments instead of one.
Luckily our Instagram comment picker can automate this for you. It will help you to pick a winner and post the announcement once the giveaway is over.

Combo entries (e.g. like, follow, tag a friend)

This is probably the most popular type of giveaway, and it's a combination of all the ones above. It combines several rules, and in order to be eligible and to get an entry, you need to like the post, tag a friend in the comments and follow the account. In this case, the barrier to entry is quite high. Still, it allows you to get a much better performance because all of those conditions complement each other to increase engagement with the Instagram algorithm. If users comment and like your post, if they follow your account at a good rate, Instagram will see that and start showing your post to more people.

This is another type of giveaway where Arbitery can be handy since it's going to be really hard to fairly pick a random winner from all of the comments, likes, and followers that your giveaway will generate.