Looking for the best social media giveaway ideas to use? With the right giveaway, you can make a massive impact on social media.

We love social media contests because they’re one of the best ways a business can interact with its fans, build a strong community, and generate leads to turn into sales.

In this guide, we’ll cover 25 clever ideas for your next social media giveaway, including types of contests, prize ideas, and some contest page best practices.

Let’s get into it.

  1. Run a Photo Contest
  2. Run a Referral Contest
  3.  Run a Branded Hashtag Contest
  4. Add a Countdown Timer
  5. Add a Benefit Checklist
  6. Update Your Cover Photo/Bio
  7. Add Checkboxes/More Info
  8. Share Prompt
  9. Coupon Contest
  10.  Share Entries
  11. Highlight the Value Of Your Prize
  12. Partner Up With Other Brands
  13. Host On a Facebook Tab
  14. Run Ads for Your Business Giveaway
  15. Choose a Giveaway Theme
  16. Use Your Newsletter
  17. Win a Free Year Of…
  18. Offer a Getaway
  19. Offer a Prize Package
  20. Offer a Gift Card
  21. Run Seasonal Giveaways
  22. Video Contests
  23. Giveaways for Local Businesses
  24.  Caption Contest
  25.  Offer Limited Edition Products

Social Media Giveaway Idea #1: Run a Photo Contest

photo contest social media giveaway idea

We love photo contests because they get your entrants invested – contestants are more invested when they’ve created something themselves.

On top of that, photo contests help you collect user-generated content that you can use in your future marketing efforts. This is an important way to build trust and spread brand awareness.

Photo contests are particularly great Instagram giveaway ideas. For this type of Instagram giveaway, think of a way to get users to upload a photo of your product in action, or a photo of themselves doing something using your official Instagram giveaway hashtag.

Using an Instagram giveaway tool like Wishpond makes it easy to run an Instagram contest. Keep track of all photo entrants, capture leads with each entry and spread brand awareness like crazy.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #2: Run a Referral Contest

referral contest giveaway idea

A referral contest helps you generate massive social engagement. Because participants are rewarded with extra entries for sharing your social media giveaway with other people, they’re incentivized to engage with your brand and contest on social media.

This is awesome because it helps you build your social following, and spread the word about your giveaway to your entrants’ friends and family. Whether your referral contest is an Instagram giveaway, a Facebook contest, or more, it’s a brilliant way to generate brand awareness to a much larger audience.

Just make sure you offer an incentive that contest participants will be willing to share your giveaway on their social media channels to win. This could be a free gift, a coupon code, free tickets, or any other kind of free prize your audience can’t refuse.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #3: Run a Branded Hashtag Contest

@franpittonfit Thank you so much for all the support ?? I will see you guys in a few days ??? #gymshark66 #gymshark #getfranfit @gymshark ? ily (i love you baby) – Surf Mesa

Creating a hashtag for your social media giveaway allows you to link your entries and more accurately measure your engagement.

Branded hashtag challenges are particularly popular on TikTok, but they also make for great Instagram contests.

Whether it’s a photo contest or a video contest, get entrants to upload their entry with a branded hashtag. This can help you build up a lot of interest and brand awareness. If your hashtag starts trending, expect to generate loads of valuable user-generated content.

Hashtag contests could include challenges, dance routines, product videos, or anything else that’s fun and easy to create.

When creating your hashtag, use something unique to your campaign – don’t use something generic like “#friends”, or you’ll get a ton of unintentional entries.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #4: Add a Countdown Timer

social media giveaway ideas

Adding a countdown timer to your social media giveaway landing page helps to create urgency.

Urgency is a psychological phenomenon that makes potential contest entrants aware of the time limit on your giveaway, which causes them to act more immediately. Put the countdown timer front and center so your page visitors know exactly how long they have left to enter.

Whatever kind of business giveaway ideas you use, adding a timer will help you gain more entries.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #5: Add a Benefit Checklist

social media giveaway ideas

When it comes to optimizing your giveaway page, you’ll want to consider different types of visitors. One big group of users comprises what we call “skimmers” – people who don’t really take the time to read everything on your page.

Creating a bullet-point list for the most exciting parts of your social media giveaway (usually your prize) makes it simple for people to see the benefit they’ll derive from entering your contest, helping to increase your entry rate.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #6: Update Your Cover Photo/Bio

Once your giveaway is running, you want to promote it as much as possible. One awesome way to do this on social media is to update your cover photo (on Facebook) and banner (on Twitter) to a photo that promotes your newly-created giveaway.

Highlight the prize and a URL-shortened link to your contest to make it as easy as possible for your followers to enter.

For TikTok and Instagram contests, update your bio link to a URL for your giveaway, and add a CTA to your bio (“Enter to win [awesome prize] in the link below!”) to prompt followers to visit your contest page.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #7: Add Checkboxes/More Info

social media giveaway ideas

Usually, we advocate for fewer form fields – minimizing the number of these helps you increase conversion rate by making it as easy as possible for people to enter your social media giveaway.

However, sometimes adding fields to your giveaway can help your post-contest sales efforts. Getting some additional information (for example, the type of sport an entrant plays if you’re a gym) by adding a dropdown or checkbox field to your form gives you some more insight into potential customers.

When you’re creating your after-contest email drips, you can segment your entrants based on this new information, allowing you to better personalize your marketing efforts.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #8: Share Prompt

social media giveaway ideas

This is one of our social media contest best practices since we’ve seen it work so well in the campaigns we run here at Wishpond. Basically, a share prompt is a popup that appears after a visitor has entered your social media giveaway. The popup asks entrants to follow the brand on social media and share the contest post in exchange for extra entries.

Because these people have already entered the contest, they’re more likely to respond positively to other things you ask of them, especially when they have an incentive to do so.

Share prompts drive massive social engagement, giving you more leads for your social media giveaway.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #9: Coupon Contest

social media giveaway ideas

We know that it can be tough to turn social media engagement into sales, even when you’re generating leads using a social media giveaway. One simple way to get sales from your list of entrants is to give them a coupon through email as soon as they’ve entered, or when the contest is over.

The leads you generate from your social media giveaway are “hottest” once they’ve just entered – that’s when they’re the most engaged and interested in your product.

Using marketing automation, you can send them a coupon that they can instantly redeem for a discount on their next purchase, which is a great way to get them to become paying customers.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #10: Share Entries

social media giveaway ideas

One best practice for companies that run social media giveaways is sharing great entries.

Though you shouldn’t do this for any type of Instagram contest (you don’t want to appear biased towards certain entrants), this is a particularly great strategy for photo contests because it lets you use utilize the user-generated content you’ve been collecting from your giveaway. Share these images on your social platforms, tagging the user who created the content.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #11: Highlight the Value Of Your Prize

social media giveaway ideas

One way to emphasize the benefit that your contest provides your entrants is to highlight the actual value of your prize. It’s one of our social media giveaway best practices, and we use it every day in the promotional giveaways we run for our many clients.

Why is this important for your business giveaway?

Basically, it takes something that can be quite vague (i.e. the value of the prize) and makes it concrete. This helps particularly when we consider most people won’t actually read everything on your contest landing page. Ultimately, this makes your brand prize seem more special.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #12: Partner Up With Other Brands

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Partnering with another business to run your giveaway can help you greatly increase the reach of your next social media giveaway.

Because you’re marketing to two email lists and two social media followings, you’re now reaching a new untapped segment of your target market – meaning more potential customers and not just your existing audience.

Of course, these people will only be potential customers if they’re interested in your industry. This means you have to find a partner brand that’s related to your business. This boosts your reach and can spice up your prize offering – it’s a win-win for the other business and your own business.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #13: Host On a Facebook Tab

social media giveaway ideas

Even though Instagram giveaways may be your first area of focus, Facebook is still one of the most important social media platforms. You may want to consider running your social media giveaway within a Facebook tab, making it more accessible to potential entrants who visit your page for other reasons. Pin a post or change your cover photo to direct people to the tab for your contest, which will help direct stray traffic to where you want them to be.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #14: Run Ads for Your Business Giveaway

social media giveaway ideas

As much as we love the idealism of organic reach, we also recognize it’s not a great way to reach your wide target audience. As a result, we recommend you run ads for your contest posts on social media to help spread the word about your contest. You’ll attract more relevant traffic with the potential to turn into new customers.

Run ads on Facebook or Instagram (they use the same editor) and precisely target the people who will likely be interested in your contest and your brand based on interest or location.

This will get your giveaway post a lot more exposure., helping you find more customers online.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #15: Choose a Giveaway Theme

social media giveaway ideas

Though contests are great at any time, they’re much more engaging when they revolve around a central theme. This theme could be a holiday (think Christmas, Valentines, or Easter) or an event (the Grammys, Super Bowl, Oscars, etc.). This makes your contest feel more relevant – someone is more likely to enter a contest if it’s related to something they’re already thinking about.

This is also a great way to run more giveaways, helping you to use more ideas to keep customers interested in your brand and coming back for more.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #16: Use Your Newsletter

Though you might think this is like preaching to the choir, you know best that your email list isn’t composed solely of customers.

Chances are, it’s full of a few active customers, tons of inactive ones, and even more people who are interested in your products but have never actually purchased anything.

Sharing a contest with them is a great way to reignite their interest in your brand. Because you already know they’re interested in your products, they’re likely to convert – and even more likely to turn into sales once you begin marketing to them more directly after the contest is over.

Promoting your contest shouldn’t only be done on your social media accounts – email remains one of the best ways to achieve a great ROI.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #17. Win a Free Year Of…

social media giveaway ideas

Let’s look at some prizes for your business giveaway ideas. The first is a free year (or six months, or what have you) of a certain product.

This is a great prize idea specifically because it’s attention-grabbing – a year of anything is an intriguing grand prize.

Obviously, this won’t work well if your business sells big-ticket items, but for those with small production costs, it can be a great way to spread the word about your products.

It’s also a great way to get your existing customers engaged with your business giveaway.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #18: Offer a Getaway

social media giveaway ideas

I know what you’re thinking: that’s expensive! And it is, but it’s also incredibly enticing and can help you build a huge list of leads after your contest is over.

Even if it’s a nearby getaway (for example, Vancouver to Whistler), a getaway can be a great prize idea if you’re confident that you can turn even cooler leads into sales.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #19: Offer a Prize Package

social media giveaway ideas

A simple way to make your prize a little more exciting is to make it a package.

Give away several of your products, or add other related items to one of your products, to create a prize package that’s more engaging than a single prize. Lots of entrants want to determine the value of the prize in contests they enter – adding multiple prizes together can boost the subjective value.

Business giveaways with bundled prizes also tend to get more new and loyal customers entering.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #20: Offer a Gift Card

social media giveaway ideas

Gift cards are one of the best prize ideas because they ensure that everyone who enters your contest is directly interested in your brand or products. Though they’re not the most exciting prize, giving away a gift card ensures that each of your entrants is a high-quality lead, and that means a better chance of sales down the line.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #21: Run Seasonal Giveaways

social media giveaway ideas

Of all the business giveaway ideas, seasonal giveaways remain one of the most popular. Whether these are Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram giveaways, they help you attract a lot more attention, because everyone’s talking about the specific seasonal event.

A business giveaway based on Christmas, Halloween, or Mothers Day is a brilliant way to get more customers to post content about your giveaway, earning you more social proof and more entries.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #22: Video Contests

@brittany_broski y’all can stay mad. Me n Posty stay dressin ? #ThousandDollarCrocs @crocs #sponsored ? original sound – Brittany

Video is the most engaging form of content. Right now, it’s also the most popular type of content on social media. From TikTok videos to Instagram Reels, there are loads of ways to use video for your contests.

These short-form videos also have a greater chance of going viral, which will get more customers coming to your social media page and discovering your business.

Video contests usually take the form of a hashtag contest, and they can include any fun way to get your audience to post about your brand. Video challenges are one of the best ways to do this. When done right, they could help you attract thousands of views and entries.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #23: Giveaways for Local Businesses

social media giveaway ideas

Social media giveaways are a powerful tool for any local business. To get local marketing giveaways right, make sure your business offers a giveaway that only applies to an audience in a specific area.

You could promote your giveaway in-store, use ads that target a specific local area, and localize your giveaway through your hashtag, your prizes, or what kind of entry requirements are involved. You could also partner up with another local business.

Creating a locally-focused giveaway will help you attract a relevant audience, which will help your business giveaway bring you more potential customers.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #24: Caption Contest

When it comes to Instagram giveaways, a caption contest is one of the best ways to generate more engagement on your Instagram account. It’s a smart way to attract a lot of entries with a low barrier to entry.

Just post a fun photo or video that relates to your brand and give out a free product or prize to whoever provides the best caption. While this won’t generate a lot of word-of-mouth marketing, it will help you ramp up engagement on social media.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #25: Offer Limited Edition Products

social media giveaway ideas

This is one of the best business giveaway ideas for Instagram giveaways, or any other social media platforms for that matter.

Offering a limited edition prize will get potential new customers, as well as existing happy customers, excited to enter. It’s something unique, so it will create a lot of interest.

Promote your limited edition products to your email subscribers and across your other social media channels. If you generate a lot of interest, this could also help you determine new future products.

Limited edition giveaways also help you create more urgency. People feel like they need to enter straight away as this chance won’t come around again.

Social Media Giveaway Ideas: Wrapping Up

There you go – 25 clever social media giveaway ideas you can use for your next contest. These are all awesome strategies to improve your social media management, attract new customers, generate more repeat customer purchases, and spread brand awareness.

While other marketing and lead generation strategies take quite a while to get results, social media giveaways can help you make an impact fast.

Try a couple of these giveaway ideas out, and let me know how you do in the comments below!

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Carlo Pacis

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