I created a simple spreadsheet of my giveaway posts. The purpose of my giveaways is twofold - to clear out products I don’t use and to increase my Instagram follower count. On the question of if giveaways increase follower counts, I can definitely say yes. My follower count increased on average by 3.78 with each giveaway. The best one increased the count by 15. Given that I currently have 697 followers, that’s significant.

Images

Attractive and easy-to-understand images help. E.g. a giveaway of Spellbinders stitching die sets didn’t do very well and I think that’s because the photo showed the die sets themselves. I thought that maybe crafters would be enticed by seeing the dies they could win. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Showing what the products can create is better. Alternatively a graphic that leads with the most attractive characteristic. E.g. the Pinkfresh giveaway.

Busy Images

Looking at the worst performing giveaways, in many cases it’s not hard to see why they didn’t do well. E.g. the Christmas in July giveaway would probably have done a lot better without the pretty stuff around the sample photos. The frame is much more colorful than the samples. It should be the other way around.

Fonts

I’m also thinking that script fonts create drag because they’re often harder to read than non-script fonts. Picking easy-to-read fonts is probably more important than picking pretty fonts.

Sentiment Die Sets

Two of my giveaways were for sentiment die sets. Neither performed very well. I think I need to come up with a better way to showcase the sentiments. In both cases I simply glued all the sentiments to cardstock. Probably real card samples with the sentiments would be better. That means not showing all the sentiments in the first photo. That’s worth testing.