Launch Your First Instagram Contest and Grow Your Small Business

1. Introduction: Social media contests don't need to be complicated or expensive to be successful. You already have followers and they love what you do. Your contest will encourage your followers to tag their friends and share your content. And that's going to help you grow your online community. And that's your community grows. It'll help generate sales for your online business. In this course, we're gonna be talking about different types of social media contests. What, how to develop rules, how to pick prizes, how to promote your contest, and how to choose a winner. It's not always as straightforward as it seems. So my name is rain Scott. I've worked in social media marketing for large brands for over five years. The last company I worked for had over a 160 thousand social media followers with all their accounts combined. And I hope them grow their Instagram account 20% year after year. Social media contests were a big way of how I helped achieve that. In this course, I'm using my friend's business, Beth domain studio. She's a watercolor artist and she sells originals, prints, merchandise, and other items inspired by her art. This course is made for beginners of people who don't have a lot of experience with social media marketing. Maybe you've never run a contest before or you've done one or twice and you want some tips to be more successful. By the end of this course, you will run your first Instagram contest. 2. Your Class Project: Now it's time to create your class project and Skillshare. And by creating a class project and saving your work as you go there, you can get feedback from other people. You'll be creating one project and updating it as we go. To create your class project, you need to use a desktop computer. Under the videos for this class, look for the project and resources tab and click on that green Create Project button. The first milestone is getting your Instagram account ready to be in the spotlight. We'll be talking about that more in the next lesson. But for now, you can put a link to your Instagram account in your class project. I'd love to follow you. Milestone two is to share your ideas for the class. As you go through the next lessons, you'll be asking yourself some questions and having some ideas about contest you wanted to create. This class project is a great place to keep this information. You can go back and edit it at anytime and take notes as you go through the process. And for the third and final milestone, you're going to share your finished contest. Show off what you made and let us know what you thought worked in what you want to make change for next time. And there you can add a screenshot or a link to your finished contests. Next, we'll get started on your first lesson, how to get your Instagram account ready for the spotlight. 3. Get Your Instagram Account Ready: Okay, The first step is to make sure that your Instagram bio is ready for a lot of people to be looking at it, especially if you haven't taken a look at it recently. So let's look at your profile photo. It should be a photo of you or some art you've done or some merchandise you've created. And then next, give your bio or read, does it still represent who you are? And you also want to test your links, both your website and your any contact information like your email address. And if your Instagram account is new, it's fine, but you wanna make sure you at least have nine photos so that your account looks like a legitimate account. That's not something that's umami. So I'm going to walk you through a real life example of the changes that I made to best account. So this is what her account looks like right now before the contest run. It was just focusing on how she paid West Coast watercolors and a link to her website in general. So the first change that we decided to make was adding a link to her website that related to the context he's going to run. She's going to have a contest where she gives away pet portrait of someone, then that's something a type of commissions that she takes. So that's the change that we made. First of all, here we are taking her to her website and see her prices and sizes and some examples of her work. So the next thing we thought about doing is just while the contest is running, maybe we can take out the part about how she paced West Coast animals and make it more about animal portraits. So I changed a bit in her link saying, you know, get your own pet portrait here and added that in the next I took out the other part of her bio and work with her to write something she felt comfortable about. So we said I love chairs of all shapes and sizes. It hints at her other art about the animals, the wild animals she does, but just for the contest for focusing on her favorite pet, which is dogs. So if you haven't already, be sure to add a link to your Instagram account with the changes that you've made to your class project. And up next we're gonna be talking about planning your contest by talking about different types of contexts. 4. Types of Contests: In this lesson, we'll be talking about different types of Instagram contest. Almost every contests requires people to follow you in order to be entered into the context. If you're partnering with another brand, you want to make sure that they follow them as well. There are four main building blocks from Instagram contests. You can pick and choose which building blocks you want to put together when you're building your content. The first one is to tag a friend and E, to decide if you want to allow people to take one person only or multiple, multiple tags of multiple entries. The advantage of multiple entries is that they will help more people learn about the contest and your brand. But some people may be discouraged from entering if they see that someone has entered, save ten times or 50 times. The second one is sharing your contest post to their story. And this helps your contests get out to not just the one person they tag what all of their followers on their Instagram account. One thing to be careful of is that you need to manually track who's sharing your contest posts for their stories during the whole contest. So if you want to hands-off easy contest and void the shared a story option. And the third one is to write something related to your brand in the comments. Let's say Beth wants to give away some merchandise. Surprised, she could have people go to a website and pick out what they would pick if they want. This gets people checking out our website, looking at her tote bags and our stickers and they might end up buying something while they're there. The fourth one is really simple. It's just making your contest post. Usually people add this onto the other options for the context. Another type you might have been thinking about is what we call user-generated content. For example, having people take a picture of your product and sending it into you, and then maybe having the best photo when this is really makes sense, really complicated legally, sometimes. And it can also make things complicated in terms of how do you store and track all those things. So that's outside the scope of this class. One thing to keep in mind is that the more things you ask people to do, the less likely they are to participate. If you want people to tag a friend and share it and write something witty in the comments. Then it's just going to have people, people engaging. I don't know what's right for your business. And it takes a little bit of trial and error. But as you're getting started, I definitely suggest keeping it on the simple side and then make it more complex as you go. Everything you ask people to do as part of this contest, you need to be able to verify that they actually did it in order to pick a winner fairly. I'll cover how to do that for everything I mentioned this lesson when we talk about picking a prize later on. But if you select something I haven't covered, it's something you really need to think through. For example, at the time of recording this lesson, it is not possible for you to see who's saved your Instagram post. So you shouldn't make that part of the way to enter your fonts. If you want to take a closer look at these, these Instagram contest examples, head to the projects and resources tab and then download the example contests PDF. Hopefully these examples have gotten you thinking about your contest. Now's the time to open your class project on Skillshare and jot down some notes. What do you want your contest to look like? What seems appealing? What seems like it might be too difficult. Just save those for later so that we have them when we get ready for the next section. The next section we're going to talk about turning these ideas into the actual rules for your contest. 5. Deciding on Your Rules: In this lesson, we're going to talk about turning your ideas into actual rules for your context. Here's some things you need to consider. First one is the contest start and when does it end? You want to pick a specific date and time. Second, who can enter contests? Most contests are only open to adults, whatever that age is in your area. And are you willing to ship this prize internationally, or do you want to limit it to your country or even a specific city or region. How many winners will there be? Most contest just have one. And you need to say that. How will the winter be decided? The easiest way to go is randomly selecting a winner. And what are you talking about that in the picking a winner section. Instagram requires that all contests say that your promotion is a noise sponsored, endorsed, or administered by or associated with Instagram. You're also responsible for following the local rules in your area around contexts for giveaways. Up. Next, we're going to talk about picking a prize for your context. 6. Picking Your Prize: In this lesson, we'll discuss picking the price for your contest. The easiest way to go is something that you already have because your business. For example, Beth could've picked one of her prints for stickers, but she already has at her house. Because of the theme of Beth's contest, she decided to give away a pet portrait instead, which is a type of custom art that she's making just for the person who won. You want to make sure that the prize is actually totally free. For example, a first Beth wanted to give away a discount on a very large pet portrait. But as we talked about it, realize it really wasn't appealing as a totally free, smaller portrait. A way to make your content getting even more appealing is to partner with a local business to run one contest where you give away prizes from both your and their business. You can partner with multiple people to make a very large prize pack. You'll collaborate with the other businesses to develop the rules for your one contest is usually involves following all of the businesses that were involved in contributing prices. Up. Next, we'll be putting it all together and discussing about how to actually post and promote your content. 7. Posting and Promoting Your Contest: In this lesson, we'll be talking about how to poster contest and then promote it. First, you'll need a photo for your Instagram post. I suggest a photo of your art or a photo of your prize if you have any experience using templates are free software like Canva. You can always create a little graphic like the one I made for bath here. I'm not a designer. This is totally a template. If you don't have experienced or that seems intimidating, don't stress about it. You can still have a great contest with just a straightforward photo. The text of your post is going to be largely the rules of your Instagram contests that you've already worked on a couple of lessons ago. So go ahead and copy and paste those into your Instagram post. You want to make sure it's clear how to enter your contest. I recommend a bulleted list. You'll also want to add like a fun introduction, but lets people know in the first sentence that you're giving something away and now it's time to actually post your contest Instagram. I know it'll be a little nerve-wracking, but just remember, you've done so much work to get to this point, after you've posted your work isn't finished, you're going to need to remind people several times that you are hosting a contest. One way to do this is to schedule another Instagram feed post brining people to go back to your earlier posted, enter the contest. I did this three days after the initial contest post. Another way to remind people to enter your contest is sharing your original post, the contest post to your stories with a note reminding people they only have so much time before they can enter. You want to think about any other channels you have to encourage people to enter your contest, for example, has a really strong following on Facebook, but it's trying to build her Instagram following. It's also a good idea to ask any of your friends or people that you collaborate with, if they wouldn't mind sharing the contest for you on their own fields. And so since beth and I are working on the Skillshare class together, I of course share the contest to my own social media feeds and ask people to join. So congrats, you've launched your contest. That's a really big deal and you should be really proud of yourself. It should be fun watching those entries, starting to roll it up. Next, we'll talk about selecting a winner, and that's something you need to do immediately after that contest ends. 8. Selecting Your Winner: In this lesson, we'll talk about picking your winter. I'll walk you through three different examples from simple to complex. Let's say you have a relatively small number of contrast entries. You can actually count them all by hand pretty easily. The easiest way to select the winner is by using a random number generator. What you wanna do is open up Google and type in random number generator will happen. Next is a box will open up asking your Min and max. And max is the total number of entries you had on your context. Then you just want to hit that blue Generate button. On the left there is you're randomly generated number and that's your winner. So you're going to look at states or comments in this case, you're going to count down the number of comments until you hit that number, and that's your winter. Let's say you have more entries than you'd like to count by hand. This is where using a website can help you. If you search for something like Instagram giveaway picker, you're going to see tons of websites available for you to choose from. My main criteria was one, I don't want to pay anything to use this website and to I don't want to log in and give it my credentials. The site that I chose to use to pick the winner for best contest is called verify share.com. And that's the one I'll be using this example. But it really doesn't matter what you pick as long as you're happy with it. So let's first page. It gives you options to pick entries from comments, likes, and subscribers, which they mean as followers. And since Beth's contest, she had to have people tag a friend to enter. I selected comments. Next they wanted the account name, so I put Beth domain studio. Now they're showing all of her recent posts. I recognize it as the contest posts with a little pug. So I click on that. And there it is. That's her contest post. So I hit Next. So now we're making her contests rules match the rules of this contest picker. The first one says, Do you have equal chances to win? And no, we don't. So more people that tag the more entries. So that's the one I pick. Now we need people to mention a friend, and we only require them to mention one friends. So I leave that as default. We had to follow her. So I hit click Check subscription because that's what they're calling a follow on this site. And then the last one is checking likes also require people to like the contents post. This site also has a page on stats which are going to skip over. Now it's time to actually pick the winner. So we hit the button and then we let it, think about it for a second. There we go. It's selected the winter for best contest. The final type of contests we're gonna go over is the most complex. You'd asked people to share your contest post to their story. Websites like the one I've just showed are not able to keep track of that data because Instagram stories only last for 24 hours and then they're gone. So you're going to need to manually keep track that patch or contests run. Here are two ways to see who shared your Instagram story right now. The first one is opening up your Instagram account and looking at the contest post itself. Then you'll want to click on those three dots in the upper right hand corner. Next, you'll see view story shares at the top. If you don't see that, that means no one is shared your post. On this screen, you'll see everyone who's shared your post to their stories. It's just one person in this case. When I click on it, you'll see that it has a username in the upper left-hand corner. In this case, it's fine. The second way is by opening up your direct messages. And if someone's mentioned you and they shared their story, which is like putting at and your username. It'll show up in your direct messages. So every day you're going to check in, in your contest and write down who has shared your contest to their stories. Keep it in a Google Doc or Excel, whatever you're comfortable with. Now you're going to combine the skills you learned over this entire lesson to pick your winter. Let's say your contest. You wanted someone to share your contest post to their stories and they had to follow you. You can use the random number generator to pick a winner through your list of people who've shared to your stories. And then you just want to go verify and make sure that you're following you. You've almost made it to the end. The last video just has a few tips you can keep in mind when you're working on your first contact. 9. Final Thoughts: Congrats, You've done all the work to run your first Instagram contests. That's a big deal, so congratulations on making it to the end. Here's three takeaways to keep in mind. The first one is make sure your contest is simple. If you make it too complicated, then people aren't going to bother to enter. It's going to take too much time and you won't have enough qualified entries. Second is with your prize. Think about what you already have. Do you have some prints or some merch already around that you could give it away. Or can you partner with another business that's similar to yours? So you can both give away to smaller prices to make it into a bigger prize and build each up together. The last one is before you make your contest lot asks for feedback. Ask your friends and family for feedback and make sure they understand how to enter their contest and that they would if they saw it posted. A great place to ask for feedback is in the class project. If you haven't done so already, open up that class project and share a link or a screenshot to your final contest in there. You can also reflect a bit on what worked and didn't work for you. For example, increase your Instagram followers by almost 50%. She also had some interest in her Etsy store for unrelated art and was invited to participate in an event and organizer was hosting this month. And here's the picture that she painted for her contest winner. Good luck. I can't wait to see what you make.