7 Instagram Contest Ideas to Grow Brand Awareness

7 Instagram Contest Ideas to Grow Brand Awareness

Instagram contests can also help you achieve more engagement. Best practices for running contests on Instagram Before you run your first contest, you need to be aware of some important best practices. This profile has used the combination of asking people to follow and like, thereby increasing the potential engagement this contest can produce. This contest format is especially useful for a business because it helps show potential customers how a product can be used. When writing the description for a selfie contest, create a unique hashtag and then ask people to use this hashtag whenever they post their photos. You could mention that people need to like the post that announces the contest as well as posting a selfie. Contest idea #4: Photo contest The photo contest is closely related to the selfie contest we just covered. You then ask your followers to like the one that they think is best, and the photo with the most likes wins. When running this kind of competition, you can also ask people to post their content to Facebook, as well. This contest format is simple and low-effort, making it a good choice for anyone who is new to running contests on Instagram.

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giveaway

Instagram accounts that hold contests can achieve 70% faster follower growth compared to those that don’t hold contests.

So, if you want a popular Instagram account, running contests is a great place to start.

In this post, we’ll explore how you can use Instagram contests to raise brand awareness for your business.

We’ll also dive into some of the best practices you’ll want to keep in mind when running your contests.

By the end, you’ll know how to run a successful Instagram contest that will bring your business the attention it deserves.

Let’s begin!

Why Instagram contests are a good idea

As mentioned above, Instagram contests can help you boost your follower count in a short period of time, and with little effort.

There are other ways to garner more followers, of course, but you want to use every tool in your arsenal to increase brand awareness.

Instagram contests can also help you achieve more engagement.

Posts that are related to Instagram contests tend to earn roughly 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes when compared to ‘normal’ content.

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On top of that, 91% of the posts that have achieved 1,000+ comments are contests.

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All of these stats show that running Instagram contests is one of the best ways to improve brand awareness.

If you’re worried about being stuck in a cycle of constantly churning out contests, all in the name of boosting brand awareness, don’t worry.

You don’t need to constantly run contests to reap the brand awareness benefits that Instagram can offer.

That’s because you’ll notice a trickle-down effect on the rest of your normal content as a result of running contests.

People will feel a greater affinity toward your brand due to the goodwill you’ve generated with your contests.

As a result, they’ll be more likely to share and engage with your normal content.

Plus, because contests generate more followers, there will naturally be more people exposed to your content.

This increases the likelihood that share and engagement levels will be higher than ‘pre-contest’ levels.

Best practices for running contests on Instagram

Before you run your first contest, you need to be aware of some important best practices.

Failure to acknowledge these best practices could mean that you’re going against the rules of Instagram.

It could also lead to your contest producing lackluster results, which can amount to a lot of wasted effort.

So what are these best practices?

The first is to make sure that you write a clear and detailed description for your contest.

When writing the description for your contest, be sure to cover:

  • What the rules are
  • What people need to do to be eligible
  • Any restrictions on who can enter
  • The prize
  • The deadline
  • When you will announce the winner

Doing things this way makes it easy for you to stay on the right side of the promotion guidelines provided by Instagram.

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It is important that you don’t stray from the guidelines, as doing so could put your account at risk.

Here’s a great example of a contest description.

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They’ve done a good job of making this detailed, so it’s difficult to fit into one image.

Here’s the first part, which helps establish a reason for the competition while also describing what’s on offer.

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This second part does a good job of letting people know what they need to do to be eligible to win.

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The next bit tells people how they can gain an extra entry. The terms of the contest are clearly shown, while also indicating how the winners of the contest will be announced.

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By studying how others are writing their contest descriptions, you’ll learn a lot about what separates a bad description from a good one.

You also need to ensure you’re giving away relevant prizes that your target audience will feel compelled to have.

If you focus on giving away prizes that are relevant to your target audience, your contest will generate better results.

If the products you’re giving away aren’t specific to your target audience, you run the risk of attracting followers that don’t care about your business or the products or services it provides.

In the long term, this arguably does more harm than good.

Such individuals may unfollow your account after a contest, or simply not engage with your profile in the future.

By picking the right prizes, you can reliably attract the right kinds of followers and generate brand awareness among the best demographic for your business.

All of which helps increase the odds of you earning a return-on-investment from your efforts.

As you might have guessed, giving away items of high value tends to produce higher levels of engagement.

The chart below shows that prizes worth $1,000 or more generally achieve 5.8 engagements per 100 followers.

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This figure is quite high when compared to the 1.7 engagements that brands enjoy when they give away prizes worth $99 or less.

If you want to give away a high-value prize, but you don’t have the funds to invest in one, consider arranging a partnership deal with another brand.

Provided that you have a large enough follower count, there will be brands that are willing to provide a prize for your contest in exchange for some promotion.

The way you promote the brand that provides the prize should be low-key.

In the description of the contest, simply mention that the contest is sponsored by a particular company.

This Instagram post shows how you can pull this off.

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You also need to put some thought into how you’re going to announce the contest.

It’s a good idea to use a custom image within the post that announces the contest.

Here’s an example of how you can do that.

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As shown above, there’s also the option of adding the terms of the competition to the image, too.

With all of that out of the way, let’s check out some of the contest ideas you can use.

Contest idea #1: Tag to win

The tag-to-win contest idea is nice and straightforward.

All you’re doing is asking people to tag a friend in the comments section so that they can enter the contest, as well, and become eligible to win the prize.

This contest format does a great…

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