This social media account didn’t happen organically…

It didn’t grow from buying followers…

And it didn’t grow from using bots…

Instead, it was grown using a powerful marketing gem — free giveaways. 

Giveaways help people and brands grow their social following.

And today, we’re gonna put giveaways head-to-head with other popular marketing tactics.

See for yourself which strategy is the fastest and cheapest to get you your highly engaged social followers.

1. Buying followers

Buying followers might sound cheap and effective… until you notice it gets you zero engagement.

Hootsuite did a test buying followers… and had some surprisingly depressing results.

They started off buying 1,000 followers for $9.95. At first, this seemed great.

But after a few months, not a SINGLE “follower” liked or commented on any of their photos.

When you buy followers, you aren’t buying customers — you’re buying spam bots.

The amount of followers you have doesn’t matter if they’re all bots who don’t engage.

Compare buying followers to the number of qualified followers you get running a giveaway at the same cost (a $9.95 book prize)…

That’s what a team recently did with a fiction eBook.

The end result of their giveaway? 526 total entries and more social followers. Cha-ching!

They kept their giveaway dead simple too.

Instead of spending hours trying to get new followers manually, they simply set up a giveaway that rewarded extra bonus entries if you followed their social accounts:

• 1 bonus entry for liking their fan page on Facebook
• 1 bonus entry for following on Instagram
• 1 bonus entry for following on Twitter

Win for entrants because they increased their chances to win.

And a win for the giveaway creator because they got more social followers FREE.

2. Follow-unfollow

Following other people can get you followers…

But there are big risks.

It takes lot of time to follow (and unfollow) large amounts of people, and there are no guarantees it’ll work.

Some people turn to automation — but it’s still a terrible idea.

1. It costs money to use many automation tools or services
2. You run the risk of your social profile getting banned due to over-following
3. If you don’t get banned, you lose credibility because your following count is much higher than your follower count

Twitter user WebTrafficCafe shared a story of being suspended on Twitter partly for follow-unfollow automation.

The worst part: Twitter was their largest referral traffic source. Getting banned dramatically affected their brand and business.

It took them 4 emails, multiple tweets to Twitter Support, and almost 3 weeks of waiting just to get the explanation email.

In the end, they had to create a new account from scratch. Back to square one.

Don’t get suckered into the “follow-unfollow” trap — there are faster, cheaper and safer ways to grow your social following, including giveaways.

For example, a giveaway user named Marie gave away a collection of her books.

From her simple giveaway, she got 5,357 entrants and HUNDREDS of new Instagram followers.

To get started, she made a simple offer.

No fancy pictures or epic content — just listing her home items to give away.

Next, she set up a bonus entry for entrants to follow her on Instagram. After anyone entered the giveaway, they had a chance to follow Marie for extra chances to win.

This simple one-two punch did great. Marie’s follower growth was 377% higher than normal during her giveaway.

She kept it simple by only promoting Instagram.

But if she wanted her Facebook, Twitter or YouTube to grow, all she had to do was add her other social profiles to the giveaway, too.

3. Commenting bots

While running bots may save you time because you don’t have to manually follow-unfollow, it can turn awkward REALLY fast.

Hootsuite ran an experiment that used automation software to comment on photos with certain hashtags.

The experimenter picked generic comments that cover almost any situation:

• “Nice one!”
• ”Damn!”
• “I’m jealous!”
• “your pics > my pics”

Within 12 hours, the experimenter had 6 new followers, 40 new likes, and 25 new comments. Not bad for relatively zero work…

But then the downside hit.

What he didn’t expect was the string of AWKWARD situations:

• “Damn!” on a random bride’s wedding photo
• “I’m jealous!” on a photo of a man ridiculing an ugly painting
• “your pic > my pics” on a selfie of a boy in middle school (his profile has just 4 photos, 3 of them selfies)

The final result was he gained 250 followers in 3 days… but the bot had to follow over 1,400 people in order to get those followers.

Plus, those new followers didn’t equal engagement.

“You still have to put in work to earn engagement on your photos. You can’t automate the kind of human interaction users will expect from brands.”

Compare this to running a giveaway and setting up a special tweet to get more followers, like New York Times bestselling author Ryan Holiday did.

First, Ryan set up the following tweet code on the giveaway:

https://twitter.com/home?status=Epic.%20%40RyanHoliday%20and%20%40noahkagan%20are%20giving%20away%20$2,000%20worth%20of%20the%20best%20books.%20Free%20to%20enter%3A%20http%3A//bit.ly/2Daq2bx%20%3A)%20%23giveaway%20%23win

Here’s what that tweet looked like live:

This custom message text helped push Ryan’s Twitter following to the next level.

4. Influencer marketing

How do you find influencers?

How do you send a compelling email so they WANT to help you?

After all that effort… how do you even know it’s going to work?

Finding an influencer takes a lot of time and effort. We know because we’ve tried influencer marketing in the past.

Even with really warm leads we at most average a 50% response rate. Look at all those failures!

If you decide you want to pay an influencer and avoid cold outreach, it can save you time… but it’s expensive.

The cost for a simple shoutout from Instagram influencers (with 100,000 followers) can be $1,000 or more! 

And when you pay for an influencer, engagement isn’t guaranteed.

Instead of wasting money or time on influencer outreach, a recent author launched a Walking Dead Super Fan giveaway.

With a simple $220 prize, he got 2,971 total entrants and more social followers. That comes out to $0.08 per entrant. 

To get more social followers from his giveaway, the author set up a few simple bonus entries for entrants to follow on Facebook or Twitter for more chances to win.

5. Growing organically

Maybe you’ve been learning a lot about online marketing and think you know how to grow organically.

You get started… and you realize it takes TOO LONG.

Instead of hundreds of new followers per day, your social growth looks like this…

Slowly… slowly… slowly.

Posting 10 times per day and using hashtags is time-consuming.

To grow organically, it often takes months or years waiting for your lucky break.

Giveaways can grow your social following EASIER and FASTER.

For example, a recent giveaway creator grew their social following by 2,500 in a few weeks using a simple bonus entry.

“We also picked up 2,500+ new Instagram, Twitter, Facebook & YouTube followers/subscribers on each channel from having included those tasks for additional entries.”

Compare to their normal growth of 61 followers per day, and you’ll notice how effective giveaways can be to get your more followers. 

6. Running ads

Last year, we ran Facebook Ads for another one of our businesses.

After running ads for months, we optimized, tweaked, and tested…

And we averaged $4.65 per new follower. Ouch.

And as the Facebook Ads platform changes because of all of Facebook’s privacy issues, the competition is gonna be more intense.

For many online advertisers, Facebook advertising is going to cost you more time and money.

As a Facebook Ads alternative, one company decided to give away recent a pair of athletic shoes and a sports recovery drink.

The giveaway got 3,226 entrants and only cost $200. That’s $0.06 per entrant, many of whom can be turned into social followers by asking them to follow their social pages for more deals.

Stop wasting time trying to grow your social followers using slow or bad methods:

1. Buying followers lead to zero engagement after Hootsuite bought 1,000 followers
2. “Follow-unfollow” got Twitter user WebTrafficCafe banned so she had to create a new Twitter account and start all over again
3. Commenting bots cost money and lead to awkward situations with random users
4. Influencer marketing has a 50% or higher failure rate on outreach, and paying for an influencer can cost $1,000+
5. Growing organically can take months or years to get any traction — one of our accounts we saw only grows one follower per day! Do you really want to wait 2 years for 700 followers?
6. Running ads costs $4.65 new follower, which adds up quickly

Instead of wasting time or money trying to grow your social following, use giveaways to get more followers quickly and inexpensively.

Run a giveaway FREE using KingSumo

Or 2x your Twitter followers in only a month? 

It’s possible… and today, we’re going to show you how.

Even better, we’re NOT going to show you any questionable “hacks” or immoral strategies that get you banned from your social channels.

And best of all, these strategies will help you increase your social followers for $0! 

Your secret weapon is…

FREE viral giveaways.

4 steps to getting more social followers with a giveaway

HUNDREDS of people have increased their Instagram followers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers — and more — using viral giveaways.

In this post, we’re going to show you how to use FREE viral giveaways to grow your social followers.

RUN A GIVEAWAY USING KINGSUMO

Step 1. Maximize points for social follows

With viral giveaways, there’s a magic secret you can use to easily get more social followers.

And there’s no catch — you don’t have to buy these followers.

No spam bots, no follow-unfollow nonsense… no tricks or games.

These are REAL followers who actually want to follow you (and they’ll like your pictures).

To get these followers, you can use a simple giveaway strategy called bonus entries.

Bonus entries are your secret weapon to increase your social following…

Using viral giveaways, you can set up bonus entries to push people to follow your social channels.

For example…

• If you want someone to like your Facebook page, you can give them a bonus entry
• If you want a new Instagram follower, give another bonus entry
• If you’re trying to get more Twitter followers, give a third bonus entry

With bonus entries, you’re getting HIGHLY engaged social followers:

1. It gives your entrants more entries to your giveaway, which increase their chance of winning
2. It gets entrants to take ACTION on the things you want — like following you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere. More social followers! Sometimes, we all need a little push. Help people fall in love with your brand and content!

Bonus entries are how you grow your major social channels quickly with little effort. 

And it doesn’t stop with giving points for only when people follow you on social media…

You can also give bonus entrants when people share your giveaway on social channels.

If people tweet out your giveaway, they get a bonus entry.

If people post on Instagram, they get a bonus entry.

The more people who share your giveaway, the more people who see the giveaway… and the more social followers you can get.

Next, to take social sharing up a notch, we need to create a compelling message with some killer hashtags to make your giveaway explode.

Step 2. Focus on epic hashtags to make your content viral on social

Picture this…

Person A shares your giveaway on social media by pasting a plain link to your giveaway.

Boring copy, boring hashtags… boring everything. It’s left to die without anyone noticing. 

Person B shares your giveaway with a super compelling “see it and immediately want to follow” copy about your giveaway.

They combine the copy with high traffic hashtags that get a ton of viral traffic — plus a compelling link to your irresistible giveaway.

Imagine if you could get every single share on social media like Person B’s post.

BOOM!  That would be $$$.

You don’t have to pray and hope your giveaway reaches a professional marketer to get the Person B treatment.

Instead, you can control what everyone shares about your giveaway on their social pages.

And better shares = more social followers for you.

All you have to do is craft your message once, create the link… and profit forever from it.

You can do this by manually creating links for your favorite social media platform — or using a tool like Share Link Generator to make it easier.

When you create a compelling custom share link your followers can share, your followers will promote your message for you. It’s like free marketing help!

And when it’s compelling enough, it’ll get tons of viral attention… without any work from your side!

If you want to create a custom share link for Twitter, and add more flame to your Twitter share bonfire, start by finding effective hashtags to create a GREAT tweet that works for you.

Here’s one strategy you can use to find popular hashtags…

1. Go to Hashtagify.me and search for terms related to your giveaway. You’ll find the most popular hashtags, plus a word cloud of related hashtags.
2. Take a few of the bigger hashtags and run them through Hashtags.org to measure their popularity. You want every hashtag you use to be guaranteed traffic magnets, so we recommend only using hashtags that get 100+ tweets per hour.
3. Narrow down your list of hashtags to the 3-10 most popular hashtags.
4. Sprinkle the winning hashtags into your custom URL (or use Share Link Generator) along with mouth-watering copy.
5. Set up your customer URL in your giveaway as the share message to get bonus entries. This guarantees a successful message.

Every time people share your custom message on social media… each post will get viral attention from users searching for those popular hashtags.

And because your copy is compelling, it’ll get people to click your giveaway, enter… and then follow you on social media using the bonus entries you already set up in step 1!

Now that you’ve primed your viral machine, it’s time to send out that first killer email to get even more of your friends sharing.

Step 3: Send your first email

If you want more social followers from your giveaway, you need more people seeing it.

One of the best ways to get more attention to a giveaway is through email.

You don’t need a big email list. You don’t need to be super popular (no Homecoming King here). You don’t need to be a professional email marketer.

Even if you send to only a few dozen friends, your first email will send tidal waves and kickstart the initial traction for your giveaway.

Here are 3 places you can get people to send your email:

• Look through your Google contacts. Check your recent sent emails. Who are you contacting the most? Think specifically about friends and family.
• Look at your LinkedIn connections. You can pull email addresses from LinkedIn. Look for people who have jobs or interests related to your giveaway item. Even if you don’t know the person very well, sending an email is worth it.
• Get influencers to email for you! Find people you admire or follow online. Email them and ask if they’ll help email your giveaway to their fans. In return, you can mention them in your giveaway, in your emails, or on your social channels.

You can also use a tool like Hunter.io to find more people to email.

When you have a list of potential entrants, here’s a word-for-word template you can send…

Step 4. Promote on the platform you want people to follow

This may sound simple, but sometimes simple works best.

When you’re using a giveaway to get more social followers, it’s important to post on the channel where your followers are.

For example, if you want more Facebook fans…

• Promote your giveaway on Facebook heavily (3-4 posts)
• Reach out to Facebook influencers and other fan pages to help you promote
• If you’re able to afford it, spend money on Facebook ads

You can find your ideal followers on the same platform you’re promoting!

To get more Facebook fans noticing your giveaway, you can also use this framework for your status update:

Here are some other tips to get more traffic for your post on Facebook:

• Pin your status update on your page
• Boost your post (less expensive than buying ads)
• Use clear CTAs e.g. “enter here”, “enter to win”, and “check it out”
• Include video or images with links in your post
• Promote it in your Facebook cover photo

Boost your social followers today

Giveaways are a GREAT way to grow your social following.

They’re simple, inexpensive, and extremely effective.

When you launch your first giveaway to get more social followers, remember the 4 steps…

1. Maximize points for social follow
2. Focus on epic hashtags to make your content go viral on social
3. Send your first email to get more entrants (and social followers)
4. Promote on the platform you want people to follow

RUN A GIVEAWAY USING KINGSUMO