The Instagram photography contest is a kind of Instagram giveaway idea. It’s a kind of powerful campaign where you ask users to share selfies, pictures, and videos (typically with a specific hashtag and tagging your brand) showcasing your product or your brand, or anything else that’s engaging and valuable.
It should be noted that this kind of giveaway idea (photography contests) is very popular among users due to the fact that it allows your audience to generate whatever they’d like to. Apart from this, it provides you with user-generated content.
In this article, we’ll let you know 10 killer tips to run Instagram photography contests in addition to whatever you need to know about this contest.
Let’s sneak in!
Why you should run Instagram photography contests
There is no doubt that the impact of running Instagram photography contests on your Instagram account is huge. The biggest impact is on your brand awareness and generating followers both at the same time.
As well as boosting awareness, another major advantage of running photo contests is that they build positive associations and a sense of community around your brand.
Just imagine a bunch of happy customers sharing their photos or videos showcasing your product. Each of them uses their own fresh, trustworthy, relatable, and engaging words to introduce your products on your behalf. Isn’t it an awesome strategy to drive huge traffic to your account?
15 killer tips to run an Instagram photography contests
If you are looking for a way to make your next photography contest a big success, you’ll definitely need the following tips to do it right. As you may know it better, before starting something, we need to get some tips to succeed in it.
Plan before starting your Instagram photography contests
The more you think about the contest and plan it beforehand, the more luckily your contest will be to give you the results you need, and it can even exceed your expectations.
1. Make your goals and think of your target market
Thinking of your objectives and goals is of prime importance otherwise, you won’t be able to measure your results, or your return on investment.
Your contest vastly differs depending on who your customer is (age, gender, job, etc,) and what particular target market you would like to engage with on Instagram.
2. Make your budget
Make sure you know your budget, and it affords running the contest.
3. Pick your prize
Believe it or not, the most important element that would motivate people to participate in your contest is your prize. So try to have some appealing prize ideas. You’d better choose one which is not only valuable but also related to your niche.
4. Your incentives
Your incentive should do whatever is needed to make your audience take action to share creative photos and videos. It would be so much better to choose an incentive which is related to your business. For instance, you can either give away a gift card to your store or your brand’s products.
5. Choose a topic for your contestants
As we said, Instagram photography contests provide you with user-generated content. All you need to do is to choose the theme and let your entrants generate the content.
For Example, if you are an international restaurant, you can run a photo contest to get brilliant photos of people enjoying their traditional food, etc.
6. Run and manage your contest
All you require to do in order to set up a photography contest on Instagram is to share a post in which you announce your contest, show your prize, and give the audience instructions on how they can enter.
Note: (we’ll talk about how to manage your contest using AiGrow’s post and reward service later below)
7. Determine your Instagram photography contests time, conditions, and rules
Decide how long you’ll run it for to achieve your goal. Plus, you need to clarify the rules of your contest such as the theme of the photo, hashtags, etc. Terms and conditions include entry restrictions, how you choose the winner, entry method, etc.
Build your photography contests on Instagram
Well, now that you’ve planned everything. It’s time to start building your contest. We’ll provide some tips on how to build your contest below.
8. Create your contest hashtag
Hashtags play an important role on Instagram since it’s a great way to connect with any Instagrammer. When you use a unique tag for your campaign, you make a community for your entrants, and everyone who enters can see the other photos directly on their mobile Instagram search.
9. Include your contest in your Instagram Bio
Do you want to grab the attention of whoever visits your profile and encourage them to take part in your Instagram photography contest? Then announce your contest in your Instagram Bio.
Note: if you’ve set up a webpage that explains your giveaway (photo contest), you can simply link to it from your Bio.
10. Write an attention-grabbing title
You’d better choose a title representing your company name, the prize you’re giving, and the theme of your photo contest. Bear in mind that despite being interesting, it needs to be short and witty.
11. Include details
As we said, at first, you need to plan your Instagram photography contest. Now, you need to include the details of the contest and let the entrants know them as well.
The details include the exact time of the contest, an appealing visual of the prize, rules, conditions, how to choose the winner, how to enter the contest, etc.
Promote your contest
You need to use some tips to promote your contest on Instagram. The more you spread the words to your consumers, the more aware they will be, and your brand ends up being a great success. Let’s have a look at the tips to promote your Instagram photography contest.
12. Promote your contest on Instagram stories
Instagram stories are very useful in order to promote your contests. They help you increase your visibility and keep encouraging your fans to get involved.
You can use your stories to explain the contest in detail or link users to a post where everything is outlined using CTAs.
13. Share the contest on other social media platforms
Suppose you are active on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. In that case, it’s a good idea to announce your photo contest across all of these platforms and encourage your followers to head over to your Instagram page for a chance to win your ideal prize there.
Monitor your Instagram photography contests and choose the winner
Monitoring the entrants and the contest is of great importance. Moreover, choosing a winner is certainly the most complex component of running Instagram photography contests.
14. Use a third-party tool
Using a third-party app is highly recommended to help you with the whole process of running the photography contests on Instagram, from building it to choosing a winner.
We’ll introduce you to AiGrow’s beneficial post and reward tool below to help you run your Instagram contests with ease.
15. Promote your winner on different platforms
You can promote your winner on various platforms, not just Instagram in order to not only give your winner a bit of fame but also build the sense of trust in all the participants.
A tool to help you manage all the process of your Instagram photography contests
Running a contest is not as easy as it may seem, especially for accounts with a huge number of participants. It is a time-consuming process and also exhausting.
It doesn’t end here; you can simply choose a trustworthy tool to manage whole contests easily as A, B, C. AiGrow’s Post & Reward tool is here to help you meet your needs.
Let’s take a look at how to use this service.
- Sign up on AiGrow for free to log into your account.
2. First of all, from its dashboard, select “add Instagram account,” then add your Instagram account’s information.
3. Select “Manage Account”
4. Now, select “Post and Reward”
5. Click “Schedule a Contest”.
6. In this opened window, you can set the details such as uploading a photo, choosing the publishing date, setting conditions, etc.
- When everything is ready, you can post it immediately or schedule it.
It should be noted that when everything is done with the photography contest and the time arrives, don’t worry about how to pick the winner because AiGrow platform picks a random winner from qualified participants.
You can also set a direct message for winners, then AiGrow sends an auto direct message to winners.
Instagram giveaway picker of AiGrow
AiGrow is an all-in-one app that provides you with all the features you may need in the process of managing your account. When using its Post and Reward feature to manage your Instagram giveaway contests, all participants need to be checked to make sure if they have followed all the rules of the contest or not.
Once AiGrow checks all the giveaway entrants to make sure if they are all qualified to have the chance to win, here comes AiGrow’s giveaway picker to pick the lucky winner of the contest randomly without needing you to use other apps to pick the winner.
Conclusion
So, now you have 15 killer tips to run Instagram photography contests and also a brilliant tool available to manage every single thing about your contest. Give them a try and make your next Instagram contest a big success.
