A successful Instagram contest can build your audience and increase your brand’s visibility, migrate followers from other networks like Facebook and Twitter, source beautiful user-generated content and engage new brand advocates. After completing a study of more than 100 contests, we’ve taken the key learnings and best practices from them and created our new Definitive Guide to Instagram Photo Contests to help you maximize the potential of these powerful tools.
The Key Takeaway: Design Your Contest for the Goals You Want!
A key lesson that emerged from the study is the critical importance of designing your contest from the ground up to achieve the results you want. Let’s say for example that your goal is maximum participation and follower growth. A great way to get there is to create a contest with an appealing, brand relevant theme, a catchy, easy to remember hashtag and a prize that your audience would value (along with several prizes for runners-up.) Then ask contestants to take a selfie anytime, at any place, and simply submit that photo to your hashtag. Oh, and tell them that the winner will be selected at random. The result: tons of people will participate in your contest. Why? Because you made it easy for them to do it.
Every Instagram contest should be designed to have the fewest barriers to entry possible while still achieving your desired goal. Going back to our example, by choosing a great theme and hashtag, entrants will clearly understand the style of images your brand wants and how to submit them. Just remember that the vast majority of contest entries will come from mobile devices, so make your hashtag easy to type on a mobile keyboard. Selfies are the easiest type of of picture to take, especially if you don’t require them to be taken at a particular time of day or location, or with other people. A randomly selected winner signals to participants that by simply entering the contest, they have just as good of a chance of winning as anyone else, while multiple prizes encourage them to submit more often as they have a greater chance of being rewarded.
More Learnings, Tips and Techniques
These are just a tiny portion of the tips, findings, and techniques available in the guide. A few other things you’ll learn include:
– Why judged contests deliver higher quality UGC and more potential brand advocates
– How to design your contest landing page to ensure maximum participation
– Why adding up to six hashtags in addition to your official contest hashtag can increase likes by 200% or more
– Why you don’t need to spend a ton of money on prizes to drive huge levels of engagement
To learn more, download the guide here. Piqora has helped hundreds of brands achieve phenomenal results with Instagram photo contests, so feel free to get in touch with us to learn more about how we can help you!
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