I don’t know about you, but I get at least 2-3 messages a day in my Instagram DMs asking me to pay to be a part of an Instagram giveaway contest. It’s always an agent who wants me to pay $1000 – $5000 to have a celebrity promote me.

Here’s how the Instagram giveaway contests work:

There’s a big name celebrity like Future, Nikki Minaj, or someone with a massive following like that doing it. They offer a prize if their followers take actions like; leave a comment on a post and follow every account they follow. At the end date of the contest, they select someone who followed the contests rules to win the prize.

Meanwhile, the people who benefit are those who the celebrity follows, who the contestants had to follow in order to win. Pretty simple shit.

Here’s the pros to this process:

You’ll get a lot of followers

You’ll get a lot of exposure

You get to experience the celebrity factor

You look cool on The Gram with a ton of new followers

Here’s the cons to this process:

After the contest, a lot of the people will unfollow you

IG sees the massive follow/unfollow and knows something is up

These aren’t buyers, they were people wanting free shit

Your engagement will drop after the contest ends.

There’s good and bad to these contests, just like there’s good and bad with every type of marketing strategy. What I want to do is educate you on the best practices to make an informed decision of whether you should pay for a contest or not.

First off, you gotta be aligned with the purpose of the celebrity running the contest. If you get a rapper to promote you and you sell software, the rap fans aren’t really the right people to buy your software.

If you are trying to promote a traditional business, and you think the followers of someone like Nikki Minaj is gonna care about you or your banking business, you are wrong. They are only in it to win the contest and then they will bounce on you, never like your posts, and leave you a few bucks lighter with no results from the money you spent.

Let me give you a better example here; If you sell real estate and someone like Fredrik Eklund, Josh Altman or Tarek El Moussa promotes a contest, then you are prolly a good candidate to join that contest. The people who follow those accounts are into real estate in one form or another.

If you are a business owner and someone like Andy Frisella, Gary Vee, or Ed Mylett is doing a contest, you are prolly in good shape to join that contest too. After all, people who follow them love business icons.

If you own a business and Machine Gun Kelly or French Montana does a giveaway, there is literally no benefit to you or your business in that contest. Those fans aren’t into business icons, they are into music.

Having a lot of followers isn’t what it’s cracked out to be. We all get star struck when we see someone with a million followers. Most people want to be rich, famous, or both. We think if we align with a ton of followers, there has to be a certain percentage of them that will buy from us. This is not always true.

If you have a million followers and you get 400 like per post, you look like a fake it until you make type. Sure you have a ton of followers but 99.9% of them only follow you because they forgot to unfollow you. Instagram sees this and the algorithm throttles you because you don’t get the proper amount of engagement for your following. This actually hurts you more than it helps.

Looking like you’re social media famous and actually being social media famous are two, way different things. Followers are cool, but engagement is everything. If your followers don’t see your posts, there’s no use in having the followers.

If you want to look like you’re winning but not really win, random contests with random followers might be good for you. If you want to be more targeted and get the right followers, only pay for contests with celebrities that align with your business agenda.

If you promote ecom or a cool business like that, sure random contests might sell you some t-shirts or whatever. If you sell credit card processing and join a contest from a chick who takes pics in a thong all day and has 3M followers will not do a thing for you. They want ass, not credit.

Choose wisely and make sure you spend your marketing dollars where they count. if not, you could end up hurting your business more than you help it with contests and giveaways.