Who doesn’t love free things? Companies can wield this appeal as a powerful social media strategy.
The prospect of receiving a product at no cost—no matter what the value—triggers a real emotional response that propels us to take advantage of “freebies.” Frequent giveaways on Instagram (among other social media platforms) are a great way for companies to engage with followers and increase exposure.
Giveaway posts help spread brand awareness more than any other type of post, provide people with a direct motivation to check out a page’s content, and encourage users to interact with that content through likes, shares, and comments.
So what does this look like in real-world application for publishers?
Examining the Big Five publishers, I determined how often each company utilizes the power of giveaways on their Instagram pages and how the giveaways affect follower engagement.
Research
Through purposive sampling, I gathered 54 total posts from the profiles of the Big Five. I first aimed to find the number of posts on each Instagram page within a three-month span of time that contained specific captions about a giveaway or sweepstakes.
Results are shown in the table below.
An independent coder and I used my simple codebook (with a Cohen’s Kappa of 1.0) to verify the classification of these 18 posts as traditional giveaway posts.
For each data point, we also coded the post directly preceding it and the post directly succeeding it. All were classified as not traditional giveaway posts, and they comprise the remaining 36 sampled posts.
My codebook is shown below for reference.
I noted the number of likes on the post before and after each giveaway post in order to investigate potential patterns of increased or decreased follower engagement related to giveaways. This helped me to gauge the value of giveaways for publishers on Instagram.
My finding was that exactly two-thirds (0.666%) of the succeeding posts had accrued more likes than their corresponding preceding posts.
Conclusion
The data indicate that the two publishing houses with the largest followings (Penguin Random House and HarperCollins) utilized giveaways more than their competitors.
Taking into consideration that two-thirds of the total number of sampled succeeding posts were marked by increased follower engagement, it could be inferred that their large followings are—in part—due to their frequent giveaways, and the engagement from a giveaway tends to sustain across multiple posts.
While companies must be careful not to devalue their product or wear down the emotional impact of giveaways by posting them too often, it is safe to conclude from this data that frequent giveaways on Instagram are a common and beneficial practice for publishing houses looking to increase exposure and to engage more with their followers.
Read more on Bookmark about how to improve Instagram presence.