How a beauty creator grew 12,400 followers in 60 days with weekly giveaways
@carla_mendes
Beauty creator Carla Mendes used PickAWin's weekly cadence + cinematic Premium reveals to grow from 8k to 20k followers in 60 days — with zero ad spend.
12,400
new followers in 60 days
+340%
weekly engagement increase
$0
ad spend (organic only)
8x
story views (vs. baseline)
R$ 4,200
earned from brand sponsorships during the test
9
weekly giveaways completed
The challenge
Carla had been stuck at 8,000 followers for 6 months. Her engagement was decent (3-4% on Reels) but follower growth had plateaued. She tried the usual playbook — collabs, hashtag pods, paid shoutouts — but nothing moved the needle past 100-200 net new followers per month. Worse, the influencer market in Brazil was saturating fast: 4 competitors in her niche launched in Q4 2025 alone.
The PickAWin strategy
Carla switched to a weekly giveaway cadence on PickAWin's Premium tier. Every Monday she'd post a Reel announcing a small product giveaway (≈R$80 value — usually a perfume or makeup item from a partner brand who paid her for the placement). The CTA was always the same: 'comment your favorite color + tag a friend who'd love this'. On Friday she'd run the draw using PickAWin's cinematic podium reveal and post the 30-second video to her stories + feed. The reveal video itself became shareable content — her followers DM'd it to friends saying 'this is so satisfying to watch'.
"I'd tried everything to break past 8k. The thing that finally worked wasn't fancy content — it was making the giveaway itself feel like a TV show. PickAWin's cinematic reveal made my followers actually wait for Friday."
— Carla Mendes, beauty creator
Timeline
Account at 8,047 followers. First giveaway posted on Monday with PickAWin Premium. Comment count: 312 by end of week.
First cinematic draw posted Friday evening. Story views jumped from 2k → 11k overnight.
Second giveaway. Comment count: 890. New followers: +480 from week 1.
Account at 11,200. Brand sponsorships start coming in unsolicited.
Account at 20,447. Engagement rate up from 3.4% → 11.8%. Carla raises her sponsorship rate 2x.
Key takeaways
- →Weekly cadence beats one-off giveaways — followers learn to expect content on a schedule, which trains the algorithm.
- →The cinematic reveal video is itself shareable content. Don't think of the draw as 'admin work' — think of it as a 30-second Reel.
- →Small prizes work fine if the cadence is consistent. R$80 every week beats R$5,000 once a quarter.
- →Brand sponsorships pay for the giveaway prizes — Carla's actual cash outlay was R$0 across all 9 weeks.
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