Learn how to build campaigns that rally your community while promoting your business and creating brand advocates. Through strategic use of Instagram tools, you can incentivize audiences to become active participants in your campaigns, resulting in greater reach, meaningful conversations, and increased growth.
When Instagram’s latest feature, Guides, became available to all users, Simply Social Media started to experiment with how to utilize it for our community while getting some extra points with Instagram. A handy rule of thumb is that anytime a social platform releases a new feature or enhancement, they want to see your account use it. Quite often, early adopters will even be rewarded by the algorithm for testing it out.
Our @simplysantafenm Instagram account promotes and supports our local community, so we utilized the new Guides feature to highlight our community through various Santa Fe-themed Guides.
To double down on the new feature, create a campaign that engages and excites your community. In our case, it was a no-brainer of how to introduce this new feature while creating meaningful interactions with our followers: we hosted Instagram Guide giveaways! This allowed us to do what we do best—utilize Instagram’s tools to promote the small businesses and creators in our community—and build robust interest in the new feature.
Giveaways are an easy and effective way to activate your community as they allow your audience to become involved directly in the campaign, rather than being asked to passively consume the content. This means real engagement, rather than simply broadcasting.
Strategize, Experiment, and Stay Nimble
Giveaways can get complicated, for both you and the user, so our advice is to always keep it simple. Skip multiple account follows and email sign-ups as part of the entry point. Instead, opt for tag-a-friend and follow approach. This is a great approach as peer to peer recommendations are super common on Instagram, and tagging a friend truly is effective in bringing new audiences to your campaign. In highly technical terms, this is called a win-win.
An example of one of our Guide Giveaway posts.
If you want to create opportunities for additional entries, be sure to strategize what will work best with your time as well as your brand. We started the giveaways by giving an extra entry to anyone who shared the Guide in their stories and tagged us—this was important because IG doesn’t notify you if someone shares the Guide you created a real miss in our opinion. This option would also increase the reach of the Guide itself. However, this turned out to be hard to track entry and did not have the desired results we were hoping to see. So, we changed course. For the following giveaways, we returned to our roots of creating conversation and added a chance for additional entries if the person left a review or testimonial about one of the businesses featured in the Guide. People LOVE to talk about their good experiences, other followers trust their peers, and it encourages them to explore the Guides. Even better? These reviews and testimonials can be used as any other you would find on Google or Facebook, which is a very valuable resource for gauging how the community values a business’s products and services.
As you can see here, users were quick to post mini love letters in the comments, which can double as testimonials for the makers involved.
The key takeaway here: experiment! And experiment wisely! When we saw that one of the aspects of our campaign wasn’t performing, we knew we needed to change the incentive. An important facet here is that you need to be paying attention and be nimble. We had seen so many others offering story shares as a way to improve reach that we wanted to try it for ourselves, but it wasn’t of interest to our community. But that’s the beauty of social, it’s fast and ever-changing, so we didn’t hesitate to ditch that aspect and implement a proven strategy. This is a golden opportunity to learn what does and doesn’t resonate with your audience with very low-risk, so take advantage of that and see what works.
Finish Strong
Sure, giveaways are a great campaign method to activate your audience, because people love to win things (let’s be real, so do we!), but did you know they’re also an amazing tool for building meaningful relationships? Don’t let your efforts go to waste—all of the comments on the giveaway posts are opportunities to engage with who commented. They create a space for you to acknowledge your followers as influencers, and can be the start of an impactful relationship, so pay attention to who’s engaging and engage right back. Take it a step further and offer a comped meal or gift certificate and voila, you have turned that fan into a powerful brand advocate!
The Guide giveaways were also supported by Instagram Stories. Each new giveaway was announced on our feed and then shared to Stories to drive traffic back to the giveaway post. Winners were announced through Stories and saved to a “Giveaway” highlight so the information could be easily accessed. This lived next to a highlight for the Guides themselves, so ideally once someone watched the giveaway highlights, they would also stick around to see more information about the Guides themselves, with direct links back. An extra but simple step to increase the power of your initial post.
To take advantage of all communication channels within Instagram, we shared the giveaways and Guides to our Stories and saved them in Highlights for future viewing.
You can apply this concept of promoting your posts through all of Instagram’s features. We’re fortunate to have the Swipe Up feature, so we utilized that to drive traffic back to the Guides themselves. Even if you don’t have Swipe Up (yet!), get creative with how you can create tactful loops of your content. (Unfortunately, Instagram does not offer analytic data on the Guides themselves, but we expect this to be available at some point if IG is serious about them being used in a business context.)
Added bonus: while not the objective of our campaign, our efforts resulted in significant organic growth that exceeded our expectations. Our account grew organically by 1,751 in a 37 day period, up 4.46%!
Another unexpected result was the amount of earned media that was created by this campaign. We received a write up in a popular e-newsletter by one of our local papers and appeared on a local radio show, which was then saved as a podcast that we could reuse. Not bad for one campaign, right?
