How to Run a Successful Instagram Giveaway

If you’re looking for ways to increase follower count, giveaways are a great way to do that. We’ve compiled our steps to running a successful Instagram giveaway to help you get to that next milestone and engage with a new audience.

Pick a Concept

Is there a holiday coming up? Is there a product launch you want to take advantage of? Did you just celebrate a major milestone (anniversary, follower count, etc.)? Pick a concept for the giveaway so it gives you a theme to work with for the photography.

Think about what your audience is going to engage with and get excited about. This will help them be more invested in the giveaway.

Choose a Prize

Choose a prize that aligns with your business and purpose. For example, if you’re focused on health and fitness, a giveaway that includes vitamins and supplements will be the most successful, such as vitamins and supplements. If you’re focused on beauty, a skincare giveaway will be more successful than, say, an iPad giveaway (seriously, don’t do this).

And keep in mind you don’t have to limit yourself to just the product you sell. If you sell skincare, think about including items that are related (but not competitive) to the product. For example, you could include a toiletry case with a Celavive giveaway, or you could do a travel-themed giveaway and include USANA® Probiotic, a HealthPak™, and a few travel accessories.

Give away full-size product. While it costs more upfront to give away a full-size bottle of product, it is an investment in your business. The better the incentive, the more successful your giveaway is likely to be!

Determine the Rules

Make the rules very clear in your post. We recommend that you ask participants to follow your account and tag a friend in comments. This not only increases your follower count, but it also increases your exposure, since they’ve just shared the giveaway with their friends.

Choose a Deadline

Decide how long you want to run the giveaway. We recommend a shorter giveaway for Instagram. Giveaways that are approximately three days in length are best—you’ll often see this on our account. It gives people time to enter and be excited, but you don’t risk losing excitement either. And make sure you tell your audience when you’re going to announce the winner. It’s best to leave yourself one to three days to determine the winner.

Create an Image to Post

Here’s the fun part! Remember when we talked about the concept in the first step? This is when you get to make that concept come to life. Gather the products you’re giving away, plus anything to help showcase the theme, and shoot a top-down photo of the giveaway prizes. People want to see what they’re entering to win, and a beautiful top-down photo will not only be eye catching on your feed, but it’ll inspire more people to enter.

We’ve rounded up a few of our favorite giveaway photo examples:

Example 1: Celavive Giveaway

Example 2: 12 Days of Giving 

How to choose a winner once the giveaway has ended:

To keep things fair, all winners are chosen at random and then vetted to make sure they have followed all of the contest rules. To do this, we generally use an online randomizer, or compile all of our entrants into an Excel spreadsheet, where we use a random selection formula.

No matter what you decide, be sure to take a look at Instagram’s promotion guidelines. Rules can change often and without announcement, so you want to make sure you are always abiding by Instagram’s official promotion rules.

Also, be sure to follow the USANA corporate Instagram account, @USANAinc. We often run giveaways, so you can take a look to see how we structure ours, and enter for your chance to win.

In the U.S. sweepstakes are legal. But in order to avoid the restrictions established by lottery laws, the promoter must not require a purchase to participate. A sweepstakes is defined as a promotional device in which prizes are offered to participants selected on a random basis. No purchase may be required to participate. Note that the states of New York and Florida require a sweepstakes to be registered if the retail value of the prize or prizes given exceeds $5000 and the sweepstakes is run in connection with sale or advertisement of consumer products or services. Rhode Island also requires registration of sweepstakes if the retail value of the prize or prizes awarded exceeds $500 and the sweepstakes is offered by a retail establishment to promote its business.