Social Media Giveaways for Outdoor Hospitality
We've analyzed how outdoor hospitality operators use giveaways to market their businesses and we're sharing our findings this week.
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Estimated time to read: 5 minutes
TL;DR:
Giveaways are a proven way to generate engagement on social media.
To run your giveaway, determine:
Your offer
Your ask for contestants
Logistics
Terms and Conditions
Do you need a collaborator?
See below for some great examples!
What is a social media giveaway for Outdoor Hospitality?
It is when a business owner runs a free contest through social media with a chance at winning a prize in exchange for engagement on social media and/or submission of contact info. Instagram seems to be the most popular platform for giveaways in the hospitality industry.
If you spend time on Instagram, you’ve likely seen or participated in giveaways. My interest in employing the giveaway for outdoor hospitality grew significantly when I read about the strategy in the writings of Isaac French and Ben Wolff (thanks, fellas!).
Why do giveaways?
Other than showing appreciation for your customers and followers, there are 3 main goals when doing giveaways through social media.
Increase engagement on your social media accounts.
Grow your follower count on social media accounts.
Grow your marketing lists outside of social media.
Strategies
Expanding on the 3 reasons above, giveaway strategies typically involve getting contestants to sign up and/or perform tasks to enter a contest for a prize.
It seems that the success of giveaways comes down to two things:
How compelling is the prize?
How effective is the post at drawing engagement, comments, likes, and shares?
Giveaway contests usually ask contestants to do some combination of the following:
Like the post
Tag friends
Comment with a specific word or phrase
Share the post
Submit contact info on an external web page
If you can draw contestants to your post and drive engagement through likes, tags, comments, and shares, more people will see your giveaway post organically, and the algorithm is more likely to drive even more views.
The offer
We often see two popular types of offers with giveaways:
Offer credit or product directly from the business running the giveaway contest.
Offer a product or credit from a relevant third-party business and/or collaborator on the giveaway.
If you don’t have a lot of followers or reach through a collaborator on your giveaway, you’ll likely have to offer a compelling prize to drive interest. For example, we only had 525 followers on one of our Instagram accounts, where we recently ran a giveaway, and we offered a $500 camping voucher as the grand prize and offered all contestants a 25% discount code good for 1 stay during the 2025 season.
Considering it was our first attempt on this account, we’re pretty happy with the results:
Collaborations (influencers and brands)
A smart way to get more reach with the post is to collaborate with an influencer or another brand on the giveaway. This will likely cost money through a marketing fee to an influencer or purchasing something from another brand to offer in the giveaway.
We aim to experiment with giveaways over an extended period, so we started with a simple solo giveaway to get a baseline performance expectation.
Of course, you can also budget ad spend to promote/boost the post to get more reach.
Logistics
Here are considerations for the logistics of your giveaway:
Don’t make the ask too complicated. Make the instructions clear.
Determine your Terms and Conditions. Be aware of state laws that may impact your giveaway.
Set a time limit for the giveaway.
Get organized for tracking your contestants.
Choose a fair method for selecting a winner—something like this.
Examples
Here is an example of a giveaway we ran yesterday at one of our campgrounds:
To do our research and find inspiration for our giveaways, we searched terms on Instagram (search on your phone, not the web), like:
“camp giveaway”
“camping giveaway”
“glamping giveaway”
Here are some examples we liked:
If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, we’ll be diving deeper into this strategy and other marketing strategies we’re actually employing at our campgrounds on our podcast, which you can access here.
That’s all for this week. Thank you so much for reading!
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