I run a small candle and home-goods shop on a side street that gets foot traffic when the weather is nice and absolutely no foot traffic when it is not. My Instagram had been sitting at 2,143 followers for almost six months. Every reel I posted got 400 views, every photo got 30 likes, and not one person had ever DM'd me to ask about an order.
I had watched roughly 40 hours of YouTube videos telling me giveaways were the single best growth tactic for a small product business. So I decided to commit. Four weeks. One giveaway per week. Real prizes from my own inventory, plus a couple of partner gift cards. I wanted to see if the hype was real or if I was about to set $180 on fire.
Week one: the rules I told myself
I set up the first giveaway with the exact format every influencer recommended. Follow the account. Like the post. Tag two friends. Bonus entry if you share to your story. The prize was a $45 candle bundle, which is about my median order value, so I told myself worst case I am giving away one order to gain a hundred followers.
Before I hit post I wrote down what I expected: 200 new followers, 50 comments, 10 story shares. I wanted a baseline so I could not bend the numbers in my favor at the end.
What actually happened in week one
The post went up Tuesday morning. By Tuesday night I had 340 comments. By Friday I had 612 comments and 287 new followers. I felt like a genius. I went to bed that night thinking I had cracked the code.
Then I looked at the followers. About 40 of them were giveaway-hunter accounts with names like 'wins_everything_2024' and 'lucky_lou_giveaways'. Another 60 had zero posts. Maybe 100 were real-looking accounts in the right age range. The rest were a mystery. Engagement on my next two non-giveaway posts dropped 60 percent. Instagram's algorithm seemed to take one look at the new audience and conclude my account was now in the 'giveaway' niche.
Week two: tightening the rules
I knew week one was attracting the wrong people, so I changed the format. Same prize budget, different rules. To enter you had to comment your favorite scent and what room you would put the candle in. No tagging required. I also added that the winner had to be a US-based account because I cannot afford international shipping on a $45 bundle.
Comments dropped to 110 for the week. Followers gained: 84. But this time when I scrolled through the followers, almost all of them looked like real humans who actually like candles. Engagement on my next regular post went back to roughly normal.
Week three: the partner experiment
I had read that co-hosted giveaways are the highest-ROI variant because the partner account drives qualified followers from a related niche. So I reached out to a small ceramicist who makes mugs in a similar aesthetic. We combined a candle bundle and two mugs into a single prize. Each of us posted the giveaway and required follows of both accounts.
This one worked the best by a margin. 412 new followers in five days, and the quality was the best of any week. The ceramicist's audience was clearly my audience. About 20 of those followers DM'd within two weeks asking about specific candles. Five became paying customers in the next 30 days. I should have started with this format and skipped weeks one and two entirely.
Week four: the truth-or-dare giveaway
For the last week I wanted to try a format I had not seen anywhere. I called it the 'truth' giveaway. The rule was simple: comment on the post telling me what you would actually do with the candle in real life. Most honest, most specific, most interesting comment wins. No follow requirement, no tagging.
It got 47 comments. Forty-seven. Embarrassingly small. But every single one was a paragraph long. I learned more about my customers from those 47 comments than from the previous 1,000. One woman said she was buying candles every time her husband had to travel for work because their kid would not sleep without the smell. I almost cried. I built three new product bundles based on the patterns I saw in those comments.
The final numbers after 30 days
- Started at 2,143 followers. Ended at 2,927. Net gain: 784.
- Total prize spend at retail value: $180. At my cost: $54.
- New customers traceable to the giveaways: 11 in the first 30 days, and 7 more in the following 60.
- Estimated revenue from those new customers in the first 90 days: $612.
- Hours spent setting up, posting, picking winners, fulfilling: about 18.
- Net 'pay rate' for my time, ignoring brand-building value: about $31 per hour.
What I wish I had known on day one
The giveaway people on YouTube are not lying. Giveaways work. But the version of 'works' they are selling and the version that exists when you are running it from your phone at 11pm are very different. The follower count goes up. The bank balance does not always follow. The two things that mattered most were the partner format and the prompt that forced people to actually write something. Everything else was theater.
After the 30 days I stopped doing weekly giveaways. They are exhausting and the long-tail benefit drops off fast. What I do now is one big co-hosted giveaway per quarter, plus an ongoing perk system for my actual customers, where the action is 'leave a Google review' or 'post a photo with the candle' instead of 'follow and tag two friends'. That is where the real money has come from.
Soft note: I now use Social Perks to run this. The 14-day free trial was enough time to know it was the system I had been duct-taping together for years.