Instagram Competitions – Ideas

20 Aug Instagram Competitions – Ideas

So, we’ve been through the rules that you’ll need to follow in order to run a competition on Instagram. We’ve also looked at the logistics you’ll need to consider in order to run the competition; now, you need to decide what type of contest you want to run.

There are a number of different types of promotions you can run, make sure you choose the one that is going to help you to reach your goal and is relevant to your brand.

Photo caption contest

Inject a bit of humour into your competition; people love to show their funny side and nothing enables them to do so quite like a caption contest. All you need is an interesting photo that is relevant to your brand – could be a behind-the-scenes image – post it to your Instagram speed and ask people to caption it. The best one in your opinion wins a prize.

Follow, Like, and Comment to Win

This is one of the most popular Instagram competitions. It’s the easiest to enter, and fairly easy for you and your team to monitor and administer. It’s a great way to gain followers but it’s not necessarily the best way to generate new leads. You’re likely to see a good number of entrants and interest, but converting that into a transaction is difficult. So, make sure people who are entering, learn something from your brand in that small window of consciousness.

Trivia-based

A trivia contest is a great way to bring in brand love as people respond and show their knowledge about your company. You could also ask questions related to the subject of what you sell or offer, rather than just asking general facts that have nothing specifically linking them back to your business.

It might encourage people who are new to your brand to research the answer and learn more about you.

Skill-based

Asking fans to showcase their skills related to your product or brand is a great way of showing off the effectiveness and range of what you offer. The entries that come in can serve as social proof for how well your products work, giving more people confidence in them.

Then, rather than simply picking a winner at random, you can choose the person who showed the most/best skill.

Tag-a-friend

A tag-a-friend contest can be a great way to get your existing network to increase your reach. People may have friends who don’t follow or have never heard of you and this is an opportunity to scoop them up into your followership. It’s a fairly simple concept, ask users to tag their friends in the comments of your post for a chance to win a prize.

Each tagged person will get a notification and will usually click through to see the post, if they have a positive experience they may follow you.

Instagram Stories contest

Instagram Stories is one of the most powerful channels within the channel, so make sure you take advantage of it. As Instagram Stories are temporary posts that only last for 24 hours, you could run a 24-hour competition using the questions feature to collect entries.

User-generated content contest

Ask your followers to show themselves using your product. They could share their stories with you or even create a post related to your product or service. This is a great way to pick up some content for use in your own marketing. You will need to make creators aware that as part of this competition entry that you will be using their content in your marketing activities and be sure to credit them where necessary.

Warning

Competitions are great, BUT they do bring out the trolls. Make sure you prepare yourself for people to find loopholes in your T&Cs; we ran one competition once where we asked people to tag three friends and one entrant left more than a hundred comments with 3 different people tagged each time. It was a logistical nightmare to track, so make sure you plan your Instagram competition well!

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