Bookstagram: How To Do An Instagram Giveaway

Giveaways are a great way to boost your followers without breaking the bank. Especially in the bookish world, your “prize” can be something as simple as a book, which doesn’t have to be too expensive. Twitter givceaways? Easy: retweet and follow then use a website to pick a random retweet. Blog giveaway? Easy: use Rafflecopter. Instagram? Now that gets a little harder. As far as I know, there is no easy way to pick a winner, and choosing the entry criteria can be a little tough. So here are some of my pointers or things to consider from doing a number of them.

1. What are you giving away?

Make sure you’re giving away something people want if you want to get some followers from it. My favorite is books from The Book Depository, because it has free international shipping, so you can open your giveaway up to international people. An easy one is “[insert number] book(s) of your choice from The Book Depository!”

2. How will you tell people about the giveaway (aka the photo)?

This is where you have two different options: you take a photo and with a text app stamp the words “giveaway” across it, or you just take a photo and talk about the giveaway in the caption.

I actually prefer the second (unless you’re giving away something AMAZING like 100 books or something like that), because in general “giveaway” photos looks spammy. If the prize is NOT something they’re interested in, there is a high chance they’re going to scroll by without liking the photo or engaging at all. If you have a beautiful photo, even if they don’t realize it’s a giveaway, they will like the photo, which will up the engagement, and ultimately increase the number of people who will see the photo (new people who don’t already follow you). So I guess I like having photos without “giveaway” on them, because I feel like in the past it has increased the number of people who ultimately see the photo and enter the giveaway.

3. Giveaway criteria.

Most common criteria are as follows: 1) Follow me, 2) Tag (whatever number, usually 1-3) friends in the comment section below, 3) No giveaway accounts. 

Sharing the photo is another good criteria. I like to have people share the photo in their stories (because story viewership is really high compared to actual posts nowadays) for an additional entry, but keep in mind this DOES make choosing a winner an extra pain in the ass (because now you have to write down everyone who the shared stories somewhere, since their share will only last 24 hours. It also means you need to be checking your IG daily). It can be quite tedious and time consuming.

The other way to share a photo is have someone repost it on their page and tag you in the photo (for easy tallying later on because it will show up in your tagged photos). This is another place where having “giveaway” stamped across your photo might bite you in the butt. In general, I think less people are willing to share photos that says “giveaway” (especially instagrammers who have a uniform feed). They are more likely to share a pretty photo that will benefit them as well by hopefully increasing their engagement and maybe even get them more followers. Does this make sense? The people who tend to share the photos stamped with “giveaway” are often people who have giveaway accounts (yes, even though you explicitly said no giveaway-account is winning, it happens).

Anyway, once you’ve chosen your criteria, choose a length of time you want the giveaway to run. Probably should say 18 and older or with parental permission as well as “not affiliated with instagram” in the caption.

4. Choosing a winner.

This is where things are hard on instagram. What I’ve found to be the easiest is to copy the entire comment section of the giveaway photo (you can do this from a computer if you go to your instagram’s site, see photo example below) and paste it into something like Excel. It puts everyone’s comment on their own line. Then, if I’ve written down the list of extra entries from reposts (if that was something included in your giveaway criteria), I add that to the list, too.

From there, you can past the entire excel document into a “pick a random line” site. From there, you have them choose a random line, and whoever’s comment/username pops up is the winner. See example below (the chosen line is from @nytephoenyx as seen in the tiny font below “Random Line.”

The other option, if you’ve used excel, is just to find a random number generator, since each line will be given a number. Once it gives you a number, you can see what line, and therefore who, the number is associated with. And voila! You have your winner!

Always make sure the winner actually met all of your criteria before announcing!

Do you have any other tips/tricks for giveaways? Anything that I don’t know that would make my life easier? If you have questions, be sure to let me know in the comment section below!

A.S. Thornton

A.S. Thornton has evolved from book blogger to author with a particular fondness for writing forbidden love in ancient deserts. When not writing, she’s caring for dogs and cats as a veterinarian. You’ll never find animals at the center of her writing, though, because those fictional worlds don’t have veterinarians and her literal brain can’t accept that the poor critters would be without parasite prevention. Thornton’s debut, DAUGHTER OF THE SALT KING is available wherever books are sold.