You’ve seen them. You’ve participated. You’ve tagged your same five best friends in every one. Social media challenges have become familiar territory, particularly on Instagram.
Whether it’s a book a month club or a posting schedule you participate in with a community, comradery is created in these spaces that can sometimes be tough to find when you go for a solo scroll through your feed.
While challenges have become sort of commonplace, that doesn’t render them outdated.
If you’ve never hosted a social media challenge, we’re going to walk you through why you should and how to set it up.
Why
Unfortunately, social media has become an observational place rather than an engaging one. We’re all guilty of looking, watching and moving on to the next. Unless explicitly invited to do so, many people don’t even bother to like a post, let alone share or comment on it.
In our effort to reach the masses, many brands are just a passive digital billboard on someone’s online drive. Interesting and eye-catching isn’t enough. You have to create inclusion in order to drive action.
Your goal can’t just be to be seen. You need to actually generate activity and excitement and the way to do that is to turn the attention from you to your community.
Challenge Concept
When developing a challenge, you have to decide what it is you are challenging your followers to do.
What result are you always trying to get for your customers? What hurdle is in their way?
If you are a fitness coach, you might do a 30-day pushup challenge where you invite your fans to share their progress and then post to your Stories for a chance to win a month of personal training. Or maybe you’re a relationship educator and you are asking your audience to share their best tips for reconnecting with their partner everyday for the next month with the plan on compiling the responses into an ebook. Or maybe you have a little plant shop and you ask your followers to submit their best “plant shelfies” for a chance to win an exotic sapling you have in store.
The point is, know what your audience likes, what they want from you and how they can show off their own passion and combine that into an online activity.
Participation Requirements
Is it a posting party where you have a calendar of prompts and corresponding hashtag? Is it an offline challenge you want participants to document? Is it simply a conversational challenge, where you encourage your audience to comment and connect with one another?
You don’t have to make it complicated. In fact you shouldn’t! It needs to be as easy as possible for your audience to join.
What you want to make sure you get right is the hashtagging or tagging requirements for your challenge. Make sure there is one way to see all the activity or at least be notified of it so you can promote and engage with your people!
Materials and Launch
There should be a main hub where your audience can get all the details necessary to join. A landing page on your website, an instructional video or a designed graphic can deliver all the details in an easy and accessible way.
You may only be hosting the challenge on Instagram (or whichever platform you’ve chosen), but you can encourage your audience to join in everywhere. Email, other social media platforms, and your website can all funnel people to your challenge! We suggest keeping your challenge limited to one place though. That way you can easily follow the activity.
Challenge Winner
No, you don’t have to do a giveaway to entice participation. You certainly can, but it all depends on how much egging on you feel your audience needs to get this actively involved with your brand.
If you aren’t doing a giveaway, you can still offer something to your fans for participating:
- Feature them in your highlights so they get promoted too
- Give them a digital award/ribbon/button so they can proudly display their success
- Make them ambassadors for your message by encouraging their participation and establishing a connection
- Offer a free digital product like a course or an ebook that will get them more embedded in your brand
It’s hard to get online audiences to do something for nothing. But if at a bare minimum you can guarantee your challenge participants will meet new friends and grow their own following a bit, then you’re off to a good start.
Top Tier Followers
What a challenge can really do is show you who your top tier fans are. Those who jump at the chance to be a part of your brand should be given careful consideration. Study who they are and why you think they connect with you. Build demographic models out of them. Recruit them as your digital street team. Take your relationship to the next level!
You’ll learn so much from these fans if you take this chance to get to know those who are willing to go the extra mile to engage with you.
A challenge isn’t about mad follower growth (though it can do that). And it isn’t about driving engagement analytics (though it can do that too). It’s about getting more intimate with your audience. Take the opportunity to learn more about those in your circle and grow your brand to be a place they always want to hang out.
