3 Fun Instagram Giveaway Ideas You Should Try This Christmas

‘Tis the season to be promoting your business. And what’s the best way to do that in the world of social media? You guessed it – an Instagram giveaway!

The holiday season is a great time to boost your business, whether you’re selling products or services. Instagram giveaways provide you with a great opportunity to promote your company, partner with other brands, and spread some holiday cheer.

Here are three Instagram giveaway ideas to try out this holiday season:

1. 12 Days Of Christmas Giveaway

The 12 days of Christmas may have begun as a carol, but it has morphed into a template for a lot of other fun holiday events. For example: a Christmastime giveaway on Instagram.

Using the 12 days of Christmas as inspiration for an Instagram giveaway provides you with a neat opportunity to showcase lots of different products or services that you sell. Typically, in this style of giveaway, you would choose a winner every day, for twelve days in a row, and each winner would receive a different prize.

Prizes that you give away will ideally be something you sell. If you sell material goods, this is pretty straightforward; choose 12 products for 12 lucky winners. If you sell services, however, you’ll likely need to be a bit more creative.

Your services may work best when given away in bundles, based on time limits, or just as individual experiences. For example, depending on what type of business you have, you may want to give away a bundle of 5 Instagram posts, an hour-long one-on-one consultation with a potential client, or a free massage. You could also give away discounts as prizes each day.

The best part about hosting a 12-days-of-Christmas Instagram giveaway is that, as you promote the giveaway, you’re automatically advertising your products/services. As you announce the winner each day, you can share what that person will receive, which will pique the interest of your other followers and, hopefully, lead to increased sales for you this holiday season.

You can also draw out the marketing benefits of such a campaign by posting who the winners are and what their prizes will be at the time of the contest, and then posting follow-ups once the winners receive their prizes. This way, you can draw attention back to the items that were given away during the contest, as well as including photos of the happy winners with your products and/or positive reviews from them.

2. Festive Instagram Comment Giveaway

Another way to host an Instagram giveaway is by having followers enter the contest through your comment section. This style of giveaway is pretty straightforward: users comment on a particular post, and all who comment are entered into a drawing for a giveaway.

However, as with all things, a little creativity goes a long way, so you can certainly make this type of contest fun and festive for the holidays. You could invite entrants to comment on what they hope to get for Christmas, tell their favorite (short) Christmas memory, comment the name of their favorite Christmas carol, write their favorite flavor of Christmas cookie, or simply drop a Christmas emoji…the options are endless!

If you don’t want to choose random winners for your giveaway, and you’re willing to put in a little extra work, you could host a Christmas-themed competition in the comments section. For example, you could ask participants to come up with the best holiday-themed caption for the photo you post, the best name for a Christmas cookie bakery, or the best name for Santa’s newest reindeer.

After the window for entering the competition closes, you could then scroll through the comments and choose who had the best answers – these people are your winners.

And, as with many giveaways, it is advisable to require that participants follow your account in order to enter. You may also want to consider having entrants share your post via their story. This boosts your follow count and gets the word out about your giveaway and your business, which will help you to grow this holiday season. What better time to gain recognition than the season in which everyone is shopping?

3. Photo Christmas Story Giveaway

This style of competition is different from the one based in the comments section, as followers will enter the contest through their own pages, rather than yours.

In a photo-based Instagram giveaway, users will be invited to share a photo, via their stories, of something holiday-related in their homes. They will then tag you in their story post, as well as adding a branded hashtag.

Branded hashtags are very effective when it comes to running giveaways, as it consolidates all entries into a contest into one easy search for you. Additionally, using a branded hashtag helps followers to search through posts related to your products/services. You can include these brand-specific hashtags when posting about the winners of your giveaway and showcasing their prizes. A branded hashtag for an Instagram giveaway can be as simple as the name of your business, followed by ChristmasGiveaway.

This style of giveaway is also very effective in boosting a community environment on your page. Followers will be sharing their holiday decorations with one another, showing pieces of their home and their holiday traditions. This is a great way to cultivate connections and develop a strong sense of community among followers of your page.

You can also turn this style of giveaway into a competition, rather than a random drawing, just like with the comments-section giveaway. You can ask followers to submit a specific style of photo and then choose your favorites.

For example, you might ask entrants to submit the best ugly-Christmas-sweater photo or a photo of the most creative snowman that isn’t made out of snow. This is a fun way to create some friendly competition and get the creative juices flowing!

You could also select winners based on the most artistic or aesthetically-pleasing photo submissions. Criteria for this could be based on how the photo was taken, how it was edited, or how it was decorated within Instagram stories.

There are many fonts for Instagram, as well as stickers and drawing features, so you could even create a fun contest just based on who can get the most creative within Insta stories.

Photo contests are a fun and engaging way to boost community and maybe inspire some friendly competition all year long, but they can become extra fun and festive around the holidays!

Start Spreading Cheer With Giveaways

So, now you’ve got three ideas for Instagram giveaways that can be extra festive around the holidays. Whether your business works best with some 12-days-of-Christmas inspo, or is more suited for a comment-section competition, you’ve got lots of ideas to work with now.

So, what will you do? A random drawing from among commentators on a post? A fierce competition to see who has the best Christmas cookie photo? 12 days of winners? Just one lucky elf?

Whatever style of giveaway you decide to host, we’d love to hear how it goes. So, get to hosting, and then come back and tell us all about your giveaway experience!