Hey, I’m Matt Bacon, a music marketing professional who you might know from my Instagram series #BaconsBits. I was honored to be asked by Folk N’ Rock to write an article for you guys about music marketing. They’ve been very good friends to me over the years. So, today I wanted to talk about one of the most powerful and exciting tools to grow your Instagram account.
I am talking of course, about giveaways. Giveaways are one of the premier ways that you can get people trying to learn about your band and actively engaging with your pages. I want to talk about why giveaways work, how to execute them, and then of course how to bring them to that next level. It’s a hack basically anyone can take advantage of!
3. Why Giveaways Work
Giveaways work because, in a nutshell, people love free shit. If you can give people the chance to win something free then they will always want to participate. This is especially the case if you make things easy to sign up for. Remember, every extra layer of difficulty to a giveaway (We need your email AND your name, we need you to tag a friend AND share, whatever) will only cause you to lose entrants.
The other big thing with giveaways to remember is that they encourage interaction. This is especially of course the case on social media. As we all know, the more interaction you get on social media the more people will see you organically. So a good giveaway is in some ways a machine for pure social media growth.
2. How To Run Your Giveaways
I always recommend running giveaways as simple as possible. For social media what you should do is have a picture of what you are giving away and make the only rules ‘Follow our page and tag a friend in the comments’. Alternatively if you find a larger partner to run your giveaway the content should be the same but it should be clear entrants need to follow YOUR page not the giveaway partners page.
For giveaways for email collection I recommend you just have a simple landing page asking for people to input their emails for a chance to win. I think going too far beyond that just makes it too hard and gets people paranoid. As a not – when doing email collection giveaways, make sure all your GDPR stuff is in line otherwise you could be really running a risk!
1. How To Scale Giveaways
Of course – everyone wants to know – how do you take your giveaways to the next level? My favorite way of doing this outside of finding an influencer to partner with, is to find a bunch of bands on your level to do the giveaway with. Have everyone put something into the pot, suddenly a $20 giveaway is a $100 giveaway!
Then build a common landing page to collect emails, and have everyone direct traffic to that page. You’ve built a giveaway that has massive potential but had to do relatively little work yourself. When you find these ways to balance things out, shit gets really exciting because you are growing from everyone’s fanbase, not just your own. A rising tide lifts all ships after all!
In brief – giveaways are an awesome way to give back to your fans and get people talking about you. Furthermore they are a great way to push engagements and encourage new fans to get interacting. There’s a lot to love with giveaways and almost nothing to lose – so why not start now and see what happens?
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