Instagram: Will People Love You If You Give Them Free Stuff?
I had a brand reach out to me about a month ago that does tutorials for development. They asked if I’d recommend them to my followers, I said I couldn’t unless I actually knew what they did (trying to be ethical and authentic here) and they hooked me up with a temporarily unlocked account so I could check out their tutorials.
Then without any prompting on my part, they contacted me again and asked if I’d be interested in offering my followers free tutorials. “Heck yes” I said (not really, I said something more reserved). They gave me a graphic to use “if I wanted” but I opted to use my own because if my experiments have taught me anything, graphics don’t do well when people are used to pictures of your face.
It happened to correspond with my birthday so I got to post a super cute photo
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXDK_yglnWl/?taken-by=jonesdoeslife
It’s been over 24 hours and I have the stats:
Followers gained: 54
Likes in the past 24(ish) hours: 692
Before you look at those stats and go “WHOA, IT TOTALLY WORKED” I’m going to tell you that in the past couple of weeks my followers/day was somewhere between 12 and 143 additional followers every day (with the average follow/day being around 64). So this post didn’t do anything particularly engaging for my follower count.
The likes were pretty significant, ranking as the second busiest day for me thus far. My average likes over the past couple of weeks has been 351, so it’s an additional 342 likes that I might not have gotten otherwise.
Ultimately, it didn’t really do anything for me. People didn’t flock to me as a provider for their tutorial needs, and most of my followers seemed way more interested in wishing me happy birthday than in entering the giveaway (I did get quite a few takers). I do, however, like the idea of being able to give people who are interested an opportunity to use resources they might not otherwise use.
Would I do it again? Absolutely.