Instagram giveaways are competitions where the entrants are required to follow, typically between 20 and 40 accounts. They can provide a huge increase in followers within a short timeframe for accounts listed as the entry requirement. So, why are they bad for growth?
Don’t be fooled by the short-term increase in followers! The Instagram giveaway and competition based agencies don’t care about the long-term growth of your account.
Here are the types of followers you will get from this giveaway competitions:
- Users who will unfollow when the winner is announced
- Users who forget why they followed you and unfollow in the near future
- Users who follow 1000s of accounts and will rarely see your content
- Puppet Instagram accounts setup to enter these competitions and nothing else
- Bots
An example of trying to keep up with follower loss from giveaway competitions on Instagram.
Don’t be stuck playing catch up! Continuously paying more and more for giveaways to make up for constantly losing followers who only followed you for the chance to win a prize. This is one of the biggest challenges we encounter with clients who are frantically trying to repair their accounts after a few uninformed decisions.
What does this mean for your engagement?
Simply put, followers who follow you because they want to win a prize are not following you because they are interested in their content.
But, it goes deeper than that. The small percentage of real followers who stick around are likely to follow 1000s of accounts, and they will rarely see your posts.
Ask yourself, what’s the point in having 100,000 followers with the engagement of an account with 1,000 followers? Moreover, how do you think this will come across to brands you want to work with?
Further reading: Tribe – How a Giveaway Destroyed my Authentic Engagement
What can you do instead?
Focus on growth methods with minimal incentive to the followers. The only incentive should be you and your content, that’s how to build an engaged audience!
With the Mother Child Instagram Growth Method, Instagram users will follow because they are shown your profile, and they decided they want to. This method uses promotional direct messages to share your profile to thousands of potential fans daily. To find out more about how this Instagram growth method works, read Mother Child Method Explained.
Giveaways are one of the worst ways to grow on Instagram, not far off buying fake followers. In most cases, the users don’t know what they are signing up for, and higher value accounts unfollow when the promotion is over. It’s possible you’ll become reliant on growing this way, and you’ll have to pay more and more to get the numbers back up due to the inevitable unfollows.
