
Can a Social Media Giveaway Make Your Beauty Biz Go Viral?
Social media. It’s a hot topic these days thanks to its massive marketing potential and the ability to directly connect with a large audience. If used well, it can transform your beauty biz overnight. It’s truly that powerful of a tool.
For many beauty pros, however, it’s more frustrating than successful. Many small salons do seemingly everything right—from engaging with their community to consistently posting high-quality content—without reaping the rewards other pages experience.
Whether you find yourself riding a wave of momentum or clawing to gain traction, a giveaway is a great way to leverage social media in your favor.
The Viral Potential of a Social Media Giveaway
A popular way to build a strong following on social media is to host a giveaway. The benefits of this strategy are many, and the viral potential alone is often worth the investment for beauty pros.
While there is no guarantee that your giveaway will catapult you to social media stardom and lead to an overnight explosion in your salon’s success, going viral is a legitimate possibility. So, whether being a viral sensation is your dream or merely a means to an end, a giveaway is worth considering.
People Like Free Stuff
Growing your social media following relies on appealing to your audience. Generally, this means creating content that is educational, fun, and provides value. A giveaway, on the other hand, replaces these motivations with something else compelling—free stuff.
People like free products, especially when they fit their interests and lifestyles. When you put together a giveaway with quality products from popular brands, you are motivating your audience to engage with your post and account, resulting in explosive growth potential.
You Can Collaborate with Brands
Giveaways come with the invaluable opportunity to collaborate with brands in the industry. Not only does this allow you to network and improve your reputation by proxy, but it also opens the door to accessing the brands’ audiences.
If, for example, you have a relatively small following but manage to partner with larger, more recognizable brands, your social media reach can be instantly increased by drastic numbers. This also gives you a chance to break into new, untapped audiences that may also be interested in your beauty biz.
The exposure and access to a massive pool of followers that a collaborative giveaway can grant you are well worth the investment and lend themselves to going viral.
Giveaways Encourage Sharing
With a bit of skill and a dash of luck, it is possible to go viral on social media by simply hitting the algorithm jackpot. Unfortunately, this is not a realistic or reliable recipe for success, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the exposure you crave even if you do everything right.
The true viral power of social media giveaways lies in the way they encourage people to share your post and page. As your followers and others in your audience see your giveaway and share it in order to enter, the reach of your giveaway increases exponentially. Before you know it, word of your giveaway has spread like wildfire, and your engagement is higher than it has ever been.

Additional Benefits of Beauty Biz Giveaways
Going viral is great when it happens. While free product motivation, brand collaboration, and sharing amongst audiences are all components that can lead to your giveaway going viral, most beauty pros are unlikely to experience true viral growth. That doesn’t mean that giveaways aren’t worth your time!
In fact, the other benefits of running a beauty biz giveaway are quite compelling. Consider them in conjunction with the potential of virality, and you have a win-win.
Expand Your Email List
Having a contact list benefits your beauty biz in a variety of ways. From building a community to reaching more potential customers with email marketing campaigns, the larger your audience, the better.
Many giveaways collect contact information—including email addresses—from those entering. This means that, regardless of the numeric success of your giveaway, you will have more interested, engaged potential customers to easily reach once the giveaway has ended.
Build Brand Identity and Drive Sales
When people are exposed to your giveaway, they are also exposed to your brand. This can work wonders for brand recognition and encourage people to check out your social media pages and website. More eyes on your brand and your site means more potential clients, increased web traffic, and a boost in retail sales.
Giveaways are a wonderful way to boost your social media presence and build your beauty biz. If you’re looking for more beauty biz pointers, be sure to subscribe to EBS and visit our regularly-updated blog. We live and breathe beauty and strive to provide our community with the latest insights and high-value resources possible!