Best Practice For Holding A Competition On Instagram

The cat’s out of the bag… we have launched a competition on our Instagram @totalmerchandise to win a £50 Amazon gift card! With this competition in mind, we want to bring you part 2 of our article series on how to run a competition on Instagram. Earlier this week we discussed how to decide on a prize. We’ll jump straight into the topic of today…

Step 2: The Rules

Not always the most fun part of an Instagram competition, but there are rules that you as the business must abide by and also rules that your users should look out for. Failing to acknowledge these rules could mean you’re going against Instagram’s best practices for competition posting. Instagram have promotion guidelines (see image below) that you shouldn’t stray from. Luckily they’re pretty simple so you have a lot of creative space when running your competition.

There should also be rules for the users, such as who is eligible, what the prize is, when the deadline is and when the winner will be announced. Cover all this and check the promotion guidelines before you post!

Step 3: Decide on the type of competition.

For our current competition, we’ve gone for a comment/like to enter. This is a pretty common one to choose as it’s easy, gets good reach, encourages people to tag friends and enter multiple times, and generally generates organic engagement. You could also do a repost to enter competition, a photo competition where users share their own content with a corresponding hashtag so the business can find the user-generated content, or a hashtag content using an external third-party app.

There are loads of options when it comes to choosing the type of competition you want to run! Create a graphic for your Instagram competition or take a picture of the prize and make sure you plug it/keep it hyped until the deadline! If you’re taking an image of the prize, a good way to capture attention would be to include some text in the image like ‘WIN THIS HAMPER!’. Key words such as ‘win’, ‘competition’ and ‘prize’ will easily attract attention and ensure that people don’t just scroll past.

Next week we’ll move on to cover a few more topics within how to run an Instagram competition, but for now head over to our page @totalmerchandise to enter our latest contest!