Are Celebrity Giveaways Worth It?

It’s likely you’ve noticed a surge of massive celebrity giveaways on the ‘gram lately, with celebs like the Jenners and Kardashians offering an opportunity to win luxury prize packs (including cash money!) for following a group of accounts. With a hefty buy-in and a large group of brands and influencers participating, are these giveaways worth it for your brand? We have first hand experience on what you can expect.

Giveaway Outline

A selected celeb influencer with 126M followers posts an image of the prize pack and directs followers to another influencer’s profile where they must follow all 75 accounts that specific influencer follows. In this specific case, the prize is $30k cash and a set of luxury handbags.

Giveaway coordinators guarantee 95k follower increase for a $15k buy-in from each brand (yeah, that’s $1.1M per giveaway to the influencers and coordinators). Sound too good to be true? Well, let’s see the results.

Obstacles to Success

We know the opportunity for success here is a major boost in awareness and following, but what are the potential threats to a brand?

Before entering a major celeb giveaway with a high price tag, you may want to consider the following:

• Does the celeb’s following match my target audience?

• Is the content my brand posts relevant to the celeb’s following?

If your answers are no, you may want to pass on this opportunity. The goal here is to expand your audience with users that will continue to engage with your content after the giveaway ends, and who may convert down the line.

Continuing with the giveaway despite concerns about the influencer audience’s alignment with the brand could result in drastic drop-off rates after the giveaway closes, as well as a hard hit to your engagement rate by delivering content that isn’t relevant to this new audience.

In this case, our client began with 82.5k followers before the giveaway, and a follower demographic of 51% women, 46% men, and 26% age 35-44. This celebrity influencer’s follower demographic skewed predominantly female, ages 18-24. We knew that this audience was relevant to the brand, but that we would need to prepare our feed with content relevant to that audience, and schedule out activations following the giveaway to keep them interested.

If you answered yes to the questions above, your next step is to prime your brand’s page for an influx of new eyes on the brand.

Expectation Setting

With any huge increase in following, there are a few things to expect.

First, your engagement rate will decrease. In this case the brand is looking to more than double their following based on expectations set by the celebrity’s giveaway coordinator. It is natural to see engagement rate fall in this case, even by half or more.

Second, there will be rapid dropoff after the giveaway ends. With a giveaway this size, expect to feel the effects of giveaway dropoff for at least a month after the giveaway, more or less depending on your starting point. We went into the giveaway with our client knowing that with drop-off, if we retained 50k of these new followers it was worth the price tag.

This is where prep comes in! Priming your account to receive new followers is a best practice before any giveaway, but especially in this case. Effectively preparing your account can mitigate dropoff, increase retention, and encourage engagement.

Giveaway Prep

In the days leading up to the giveaway, we re-posted top performing content, highlighted products relevant to influencer’s follower demographic, and set up a few smaller giveaways to activate during & after the celeb giveaway.

The intention of running these smaller giveaways was to mitigate follower drop-off by reinforcing to new followers that this is a fun brand worth following after the giveaway ends. The content that we posted on our feed before the giveaway begun would act as a virtual first impression to our brand.

Giveaway Launch

The giveaway began at 7pm PST on a Wednesday and the results were as followed.

In the first 20 minutes, we were up 15k followers.

In the next 5 minutes, we were up another 5k.

It took just 3 hours to gain 50k followers.

After 15.5 hours, total follower increase reached 100k, putting our client at 181k followers.

The next day, follower growth began to slow down to about 1k every 30 minutes and on the last day, about 1k an hour.

Our peak follower count was 211k, two days and two hours after initial post. This reflected an increase of 128.5k from our starting point.

Giveaway Aftermath

Even before the giveaway was announced, we began to lose followers. In the span of one week post-giveaway, we had lost another 30k. Drop-off continued in the month that followed, down 60k and sitting at a total of 161k followers one month post-giveaway.

Drop-off began to slow after one month, with smaller giveaways and product releases helping us to gain engagement and retain followers. We were ~28k followers above the brand’s threshold for growth success, so we considered this a win.

At the one month mark, the brand’s followers are skewed from the original 50/50 male-female demo, to 63% female, 37% male. This exemplifies our earlier point of considering the celebrity’s follower demographic against your target audience.

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