Alex DittyAre you looking for a platform to manage your next Instagram campaign?
Instagram contests are a valuable asset for your overall social media marketing. Managing contests on Instagram enables you to generate authentic user-generated content to promote your brand, engage your community, and learn about those individuals. But in order to put these promotional programs together you first need to understand how to effectively manage Instagram contests. Managing contests manually through the Instagram app is difficult and ineffective so your best chances of finding success with the promotion is with an Instagram campaign management tool.
The difficulties of managing an Instagram contest
The hardest part about running Instagram campaigns is the difficulty of staying on top of the participation and the content that your community sharing. When your Instagram campaign is going well, your community will be sharing great content with you. This is your opportunity to share this visual content with your audience to authentically promote your products and services. But if you’re not using an Instagram contest management tool then displaying this content won’t be easy to do. Each post that your community shares is also your opportunity to engage those individuals and build a stronger relationship with them. This can be done manually by searching the hashtag in the Instagram app and commenting on some of the posts. But that’s a tedious process that doesn’t make tracking very easy. When you leverage a tool to manage your Instagram contests you can more easily and reliably engage your participants and measure the returns of this tracking. That tracking isn’t just limited to your engagement. With any contest that you run, you’ll want to be sure that you’re able to audit every important contest metric to understand the context of your success. When you’re manually managing the contest then you can only know how many posts were shared with that tag via the Instagram app. Using an effective Instagram contest management tool will give you the ability to track more metrics to understand the campaign’s success.
What to consider when searching for an Instagram contest management tool
Clearly, the need for a management tool for your Instagram contests is important. While you’re evaluating the tools available to you, here are some of the criteria to look for in the right Instagram campaign management solution for you!
Easy-to-implement Displays
Your community will be sharing great UGC that you’ll want to highlight outside of the visual network. Building these displays isn’t always easy and not all teams have the bandwidth for these implementations. It’s important that your contest management system provides the options for easy-to-implement visual content displays that can be launched in a variety of different ways. You may want a gallery on its own landing page or integrated within your website, you need a solution which is easy enough to fit any demand you have.
Customizable Displays
When there is time or resources available for customization to your displays, you’ll also want a platform that is flexible enough to incorporate your own custom designs to highlight your community’s content within your own branding. So look for a solution that provides access to their API to build your own galleries.
Content Moderation
What makes social media so great is its openness. But this openness also means that anyone will be able to share content with your branded hashtag for your contest. This makes the need for moderation of the content that you display paramount. Any Instagram campaign management tool that you evaluate needs to have the option to for you to decide which posts you do and don’t display.
UGC Management
As you encourage your community to share great content with your brand, you’ll want the ability to save and organize this content to supplement your other visual marketing initiatives. Look for platforms that offer these solutions with features like content bookmarking. And consider tools that provide the options to gain the rights to use the content as well.
Engagement Workflows
Interacting with your participants is one of the most valuable aspects of managing a campaign. This isn’t easy to do when you’re manually managing a contest, which means that when you’re selecting a campaign management app you need one that makes these interactions simple to manage and effective in their results.
Management Filters
One main reason for using a campaign management tool is that it makes the management much simpler. When your Instagram contest takes off (and it will if you’ve planned it well) then you’ll need to filter through the content to be able to more effectively manage your engagement and moderation. The engagement & moderation features are great but they won’t help you if you’re too overwhelmed with managing the massive amount of content in your campaign.
Contest Lead Generation
There are plenty of benefits that Instagram contests provide with UGC generation and authentic brand promotion. But one aspect of Instagram contests that is often overlooked is the opportunity to use the contests as a way to gain targeted leads for your brand. You want a contest management system that will enable you to gain email addresses, contact info and other valuable information for connecting with your most passionate fans.
Contest Measurement And Analysis
Whenever you’re running an Instagram campaign, you need to be able to measure and analyze the promotion effectively. Any Instagram campaign management tool that you select will need to provide effective reporting tools that enable you to measure the contest to understand your success and track your progress towards your goals.
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