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Everything You Need to Know About Instagram Loop Giveaways

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If you’re looking for a fun way to get new followers and grow your Instagram organically, hosting a loop giveaway can be a good idea.

But while loop giveaways on Instagram can be a great way to get more followers, sometimes they can seriously harm your account.

Before you plan your next Instagram loop giveaway, make sure you know the do’s and don’t’s!

What is a Loop Giveaway on Instagram?

If you aren’t familiar with loop giveaways on Instagram, let me get you quickly up to speed!

An Instagram loop giveaway is a special giveaway where anywhere from around 10-50 bloggers and influencers team up, and pool their money together to buy one amazing prize to give away to someone.

In order to enter the giveaway, you must follow all the bloggers and influencers who are taking part in the giveaway.

Instagram post of a giveaway

Each blogger will post the giveaway image on their own Instagram account to notify their followers about the giveaway.

Typically, loop giveaways will have accounts that range in follower numbers from 1,000 all the way up to 100,000.

The exposure can be great and it can be an easy way to gain lots of followers to your account!

As each blogger has to pay for a portion of the prize, the entry fee can range. I’ve seen some be as low as $20 and some as high as $250 – it totally depends on the prize and how many people are participating.

Key Factors of the Best Instagram Loop Giveaways

Finding a loop giveaway can be challenging. There are many different factors to take into consideration when trying to decide if a loop giveaway is right for you:

  1. the prize
  2. the price
  3. the other participants

I call these the 3 P’s of loop giveaways!

Prize

The first thing you want to consider is the prize. Loop giveaways that give away items such as iPhones or Macbooks might seem like a good idea (as everyone will want to enter), however, these products will attract lots of followers who aren’t the ideal follower for your account.

It’s a better idea to find a product that is something your ideal follower would want to enter for.

For example, if you are a mom blogger, you would want to find a loop giveaway that is giving away mom-related items!

And if you are a food blogger, perhaps some high-end cooking equipment.

Giveaway graphics on Instagram

@giveawaysisters have many loop giveaways with lots of different prizes

Price

Obviously, price is going to be something you will need to think about.

Giveaways with more expensive products will cost you more.

Alternatively, loop giveaways with fewer participants will also cost you more.

You are going to need to decide what price-point is worth it to you!

Participants

Before you jump head-first into your next loop giveaway, you also need to examine the other types of influencers who are in the giveaway.

Lots of loop giveaways will have two or three high-profile influencers with tens of thousands of followers who are going to be the driving force of the giveaway.

Before finalizing your spot, ask if you can know who else is going to be taking part in the loop.

When I did one of my loop giveaways, I neglected this part and the influencers who were driving the majority of the traffic ended up having a huge Spanish audience. Since my audience is primarily English-speaking and from America, the followers I gained from this loop giveaway were not in my niche!

Related:

Where to Find a Loop Giveaway?

You have two options when joining in on loop giveaways:

  1. find a loop giveaway to join through loop accounts
  2. manage your own loop giveaway

Find A Loop Giveaway to Join

Finding a loop giveaway to join means you won’t have control over the 3 P’s aka the prize, who is participating or the price.

However, joining in on a loop giveaway that someone else is running makes it incredibly easier.

There are several different Instagram accounts the periodically run loop giveaways. You can start by visiting the accounts to see if they are hosting any giveaways that you think would fit your niche:

The above giveaway loop accounts are just a small fraction of what you can find on Instagram. You can search for “loop giveaways” within Instagram to bring up more accounts!

Manage Your Own Loop Giveaway

The other way to participate in a loop giveaway is to manage your own! Running one yourself can get complicated, so let’s break it down into manageable steps.

Step 1: Choose The Product

First off, you need to do some research to find what your audience really wants to have.

You don’t want to be attracting everyone on the ‘gram to your giveaway or you’ll end up with lots of followers who will either unfollow you or won’t engage with your content! Having followers that don’t engage with your content is a huge problem as it will cause your number of ghost followers on Instagram to spike. Having a large number of ghost followers will hurt your account as your engagement rate will decline.

Either way, you want to minimize that and you can do so by ensuring your product appeals to your audience.

You can figure this out by polling your audience right within Instagram and asking them what they would like to win!

Instagram story asking followers what theyd like to win in a giveaway

Tip: if you are planning to collaborate with other small businesses in similar niches, you can each offer your product as a prize and create some type of basket full of your own stuff!

Step 2: Choose a Date and Time

Next, choose when your giveaway will start and when it will end. It’s important to choose a start date and a start time because usually, the participants who take part in loop giveaways all post about the giveaway at the exact same time.

You should choose a time when the majority of your followers are online so they don’t miss it, and don’t post on any holidays when people might be taking a break away from social media to spend time with family.

Step 3: Select Participants

Now it’s time to go out and find people to participate in your loop giveaway.

When finding someone to join you, you should find people who have a similar audience to yours!

Since you know your prize, you also will have a rough idea of how much it will cost people to take part in your giveaway.

When asking people if they’d like to participate, you should let them know how much the buy-in is, and when the giveaway will be held.

Since they will need to post about it to their Instagram accounts at a certain time, they will need to make sure they are available to post!

Step 4: Determine the Rules

The number one rule of a loop giveaway is that in order to qualify for an entry, the user will need to “like” the giveaway photo as well as follow all the accounts of the bloggers and influencers who are participating.

Once they have done that, they need to comment “done” under the photo on Instagram.

For an extra entry, sometimes loop giveaways will tell participants to tag a friend in the comments which will land them with one extra entry.

You also need to consider whether your giveaway is worldwide or if it will just be located to on specific area. This must be stated within your rules!

Step 5: Write the Caption and Design the Imagery

Next, it’s time to design the image that everyone will be posting as well as writing the caption.

You can easily design something on Canva.

Giveaway graphic that shows different clothing, toys and prizes that you can win

An example of an image by @loopmamas.giveaways 

In your caption, you should clearly lay out the rules, and how the participant can find all the accounts to follow for the giveaway. To list all the accounts you can:

  • tag them in the photo
  • tag them in the caption
  • open a separate Instagram account specifically for your giveaway and follow all the participants of the giveaway. Direct entrants to the account and let them know they must follow everyone who that account is following
  • Have each user tag one user, which will eventually lead the entrant back to the first account (this is how loop giveaways were traditionally done, but is tedious and entrants often give up.) Here is an example of how that would work:
    • Account A mentions account B
    • Account B mentions account C
    • Account C mention account D
    • Account D mentions account E
    • Account E mentions account A

Step 6: Run the Loop Giveaway and Choose a Winner

The last step is to run your giveaway and then choose your winner! You will need to double check that the winner is still following all the accounts and hasn’t decided to unfollow any.

Should You Do a Secret Loop Giveaway?

A secret loop giveaway (or hidden giveaways) is similar to a loop giveaway, however, you do not post about the prize.

Instead, select Instagram accounts (usually with lots of followers) will make a post and usually direct their followers to a seperate Instagram account (specifically for the giveaway), and instruct them to follow all of the followers that the Instagram account is following.

Whew. That was a mouthful. Let me explain that with an example.

Let’s say that Influencer X is posting about the giveaway. Influencer X makes a post and the caption says, “today, I’m teaming up with my favorite bloggers to give you the chance to win a $1,000 Amazon giftcard! All you have to do is head over to @giveaways4bloggers and follow everyone they’re following!“

Now, if you are in a secret loop giveaway, you don’t actually need to post anything. @giveaways4bloggers (from our made up example above) will be following you so that you still get followers, however, you don’t have to post anything announcing your participation in the giveaway (nor are you required to promote it).

The reason it’s called a hidden or secret loop giveaway is that it’s hidden from your account and you don’t need to post anything to reap the rewards.

I hope this has helped you with your loop giveaways on Instagram! Let me know in the comments below if you’ve ever participated in one and what your experience was like!


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