Instagram Competitions Are Taking Over!

Along with Pinterest (of course!), Instagram is one of my favourite social networks, not only for keeping up-to-date with friends but for interacting with brands too. It's a truly visual platform, initially with stills and now with 3-15 second long videos and it's really interesting to follow brands and influential users to see their innovative ways of marketing through social media.

One marketing method on Instagram is to run a competition - something which brands don't use as frequently as Facebook and Twitter competitions, but I think, for the right brand, an Instagram competition is worth 1,000 Facebook competitions!

How to Create an Interesting Instagram Competition

Although Instagram competitions may not get you tonnes of new followers, your account's interaction rates will rise and you'll drive users to share you with their friends.

There are a number of different types of competitions on Instagram from 'like to win' to increase likes, to photo entry competitions to drive engagement. As usual, we know that planning is key here, as it is with any social media marketing activity. There's a few elements to cover when creating a successful competition...

Set Goals

Would you like more Instagram followers? Increased brand awareness? Gain further interaction on the platform? Or to up your reach? Before you start to develop a competition, think about your goals and how you're going to monitor them to track results.

Entry Method

Depending on your goals you need to consider what users need to do to enter the competition. Perhaps it's submitting a photo, liking one of your photos (lowest effort), sharing your Instagram account to their followers or simply following you.

After you've decided on your entry method, you'll need an entry page where users can see how to enter the competition. A simple and Instagram-friendly way of doing this is to create an image detailing the prize, entry information and any rules and regulations (length, eligibility, limits and how the winner will be selected, etc) then post this on your account. 

Don't forget to include an attention-grabbing title to increase interest and a unique hashtag to up your reach and enable easy monitoring. Read more about using hashtags on all the major social networking in our recent blog post here.

Promotion

Have a think about how you're going to promote your competition to new Instagrammers. You could send details in a newsletter, promote the competition on all your other social networks, think about social media advertising and also promote it on your website.

Once your competition is up-and-running make sure you promote it frequently and once it's over, learn from the results and decide whether you'd like to make it a regular, perhaps weekly, thing.

If planned and created correctly, an Instagram competition can be really beneficial for increasing reach and engagement and fantastic at generating a buzz.

Read our Instagram app review here where we talk about the basics of Instagram and give the app a score out of 10!

See you on Instagram at BYKATIEANDJANE

Jane x