Continue with some last step to run a complete Instagram contest of your own…
8) Promote like crazy.
Now that you have got a solid plan in place, it’s time to promote the heck out of your contest.
Where’s the best place to begin spreading the word? The possibilities are seemingly endless, however, here are some ideas to encourage your promotion efforts:
- Your blog. Write a post on your website detailing the contest, and utilize it as a launch point for your contest’s landing page.
- Social media. What better place to run a social media contest than on social media? Direct your existing followers to the contest by including a shortened link in your bio and referencing that link in your promotional posts.
- Email. Extend the invitation to participate in your email subscribers by sending over a fast and friendly email to announce the contest.
9) Monitor submissions.
Monitoring both your promotional efforts and the level of participation during your contest is important for meeting your goals and making a plan to follow up on your contest.
Be sure to find out what metrics you’d like to use and how you will keep track of them. Here are some metrics to think about using:
- Number of submissions – Total number of posts submitted in compliance with your terms and conditions.
- Likes per submission – Helps you keep track of potential winners in case your contest is decided by vote.
- Number of participants – If users could submit more than one submission, how many unique participants contributed to your contest?
- Top participants – Who shared the most content during your campaign? Keeping track of this helps you better interact with your largest fans.
- Total Likes – Measures the total number of Likes on all submissions in your contest.
- Total reach – Captures the number of followers of your participants at the time of submission. Meant to show you the potential reach of your campaign.
- Follower growth during the contest – Measure how much your following increased during the contest’s time period.
In case your current audience is relatively small, and you do not expect more than 30 submissions to your contest, you might determine to monitor your contest manually. To do that, assign somebody the task of keeping track of submissions each day. At the finish of the contest, somebody will have to go through each submission and measure and write down the outcomes from each submission.
When you are monitoring your contest manually, try utilizing a tool such as Tagboard or Google Alerts to keep track of when your hashtag is being mentioned online, making it simpler to track submissions.
When you are expecting well over 30 submissions, but you could think about how difficult monitoring your submissions may be. If that’s the case, you might want to discover an Instagram-specific tool such as Iconosquare.
10) Follow up accordingly.
Once the contest is over, you could not forget to follow up on the rules you set in the first place. Keep your terms and conditions in mind when reviewing the submissions to make sure that you are being 100% fair in your evaluation.
Again, this is why establishing your terms and conditions early on is so vital, as it’ll give you a documented plan for choosing, contacting, and awarding the winner.
Once you have chosen and notified the winner, remember to make the announcement publicly. Here’s an instance of how to do so from D Magazine‘s #StayCoolDallas contest:
Ready to Run a Instagram Contest?
Now that you understand everything it takes to run a successful, engaging Instagram contest, go put your knowledge to work for your model.
Not only will you end up engaging and increasing your audience, but you’ll also end up with great new content you could use to encourage future content and contests.