At first sight, a giveaway looks like an innocent and quick way to grow your account. It doesn’t take much if you are not a celebrity with millions of followers and is much more impactful than any direct advertising.
A giveaway works like this: an organizer announces the prizes, publishes the links to accounts that users need to start following, and holds a live stream on the final day where they choose the winners.
It looks pretty good — doesn’t it? Then why a giveaway is like a snake in the grass? Here are the three core aspects that brands and bloggers do have to keep in mind:
Random followers vs. your target audience
When you set your targeted segment — you choose the parameters you are interested in, such as geographical position, income, interests, and sex — and, thus, you succeed in finding your active audience.
When you initiate a giveaway, you ask your followers to start following more than 30 accounts. Your followers do not take a closer look at the accounts they start following — so they do not look through the content of these accounts either.
Some of such new followers will definitely stay and like the content you offer, but the number of such followers will be much less than you might have expected.
Low organic reach
One giveaway promotion, depending on the scale of the drawing, brings 20k+ subscribers to the participants. But as far as all the newcomers are interested mainly in winning a contest, your statistics decrease dramatically right after you choose the winner.
Lots of unsubscribed followers are what you get being a participant of a giveaway, as any giveaway promotion is simply about boosting your follower count. These followers are not your loyal audience but rather those fond of lotteries. Your profile followers count will not influence any of your indices.
Your reach will stay the same or might even go down. With those 30k new followers, you’ll see the same number of likes as you got before the giveaway promotion.
It is not your last giveaway
Those accounts that permanently participate in giveaways depend on this type of promotion. Once a giveaway finishes, you need to pay for the next one. A massive follower loss gives way to the next wave of newcomers.
Celebrities actively use giveaways — and they get into the habit of promoting themselves in such a way. It is a frequent situation when you need to create a new account and develop it from scratch after taking part in a giveaway, as recovering your old account takes much more than creating a new one.
Giveaways on Instagram are about business. Some of the money raised from the participants cover the cost of prizes, some money is spent as a money prize, a part goes to the organizer, and the last part (rather a small one) goes to the celebrity who announced the giveaway.
Giveaways are not an efficient medium for Instagram promotion. Applied marketing tools, such as targeting, direct advertising, and collaborations, are much more effective.
A blogger or a brand will not increase the outreach using giveaways, but will get a passive audience instead.
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