How to run an instagram challenge
Today I’m talking all about how to run an instagram challenge. I ran my first one last week, sharing how to art journal and talking through the process in real time with prompts and further details following on from the post I wrote on the blog last month! Now I’m here to dissect it, talk about why I did it and what I’ve learnt for next time.
This is a big post sharing my stats and numbers, as well as tips and ideas for if you’re a fellow business owner and would like to run your own challenge one day. I’ve shared the numbers and figures first, and I go into details with tips and ideas further into the post.
I hope you enjoy reading and like delving into the behind the scenes! I’m not shy about sharing the numbers and I love it when business owners are more transparent about their stats. I love reading this sort of thing so I hope you do too, and be sure to leave me a comment if you enjoyed it!
I also want to add a caveat to this post just to clarify that I didn’t do this challenge for the numbers, and I don’t advocate you do either. It takes a lot of time and effort and usually, thanks to algorithms and lots of other factors out of your control, you don’t see a return of investment in terms of time and certainly not money. You have to make sure that whatever your subject is, it’s something you’re passionate about and truly love. It is really fun and a great way to connect to your audience so do it for that! Do it because you want to share your message and encourage conversation, but don’t go into it expecting big growth. Do it because you love sharing your passion, rather than because you want to go viral.
Now I’ve prefaced it with the why, let’s go into detail about my personal reasons for wanting to run this challenge, before looking at the numbers.
Why did I run an instagram challenge?
I’ve had it in my head for a while and I started planning and writing content way back in January earlier this year. I adore art journaling and I love seeing other people doing it too. There’s a huge wealth of knowledge and inspiration out there already on Pinterest, Youtube and Instagram, but I wanted to add my own experience into the mix. A lot of my followers and community have expressed interest in creating their own and I wanted to help.
Whenever I share a flip through of my art journals on Instagram, I get a lot of lovely responses as well as comments sharing their own thoughts that they’d love to do something similar but weren’t sure where to start. My whole ethos of my business is to encourage creativity, so it absolutely made sense to me to share my process and answer those questions.
In the lead up to running the challenge I wanted to make sure it was the right fit. If you plan on running your own challenge, the best way to find this out is to ask your audience! Add a poll on stories, ask them questions or reflect on what the most popular questions you get asked are. Clearly there’s a need for it if it’s being repeated. I love to make helpful content so it was a no brainer for me when everything pointed to people wanting it.
The only thing holding me back was my confidence! I let the idea sit in my drafts for a good five months before I plucked up the courage to go for it. It’s easy to say feel the fear and do it anyway, but a different matter entirely of actually doing it! As we were in the midst of lockdown in the UK, I put out a poll on my story in April. I love using Instagram stories as it’s a really quick and easy way to get feedback, and I gave the following options:
I have more time but no idea how or where to be creative - 16 votes
I have less time and don’t have the energy to be creative right now - 3 votes
I have more time and am loving being creative - 12 votes
I have less time but I want ideas for smaller time chunks - 4 votes
A big portion of my audience had more time but weren’t sure how or where to be creative, so my journaling challenge was going to solve it. The second most popular option was having more time and being creative already. Great! My journaling challenge will add to their inspiration and give them some more ideas for their creativity.
Numbers and stats
Now, onto the juicy stats and numbers. Did my audience grow? Did I get more engagement and was it a ‘success’?
I didn’t have a number in my head, or a definition of what ‘success’ would be like for me. I didn’t have any specifics in my head so if I didn’t reach them, I didn’t feel like a failure. The reason I had sat on the idea for months was because I was scared I wouldn’t get any engagement. I didn’t want to put out this content and not have anyone join in! But in the end, I realised that a). I LOVE this subject and am happy to share it, whether anyone was interested or not and b). It’s a tricky thing to measure. So many people have commented and saved my instagram posts to come back to later! Even if they didn’t join in during the challenge, it absolutely doesn’t mean it wasn’t inspiring or useful. People may not even share that they’ve been inspired but it doesn’t mean they haven’t! So don’t lose heart if you don’t have instant feedback. It helped not giving myself numbers to reach so I wasn’t disheartened, but also to remind myself that I love this topic and no matter what happened, I enjoyed creating the content and sharing it anyway.
All the stats below are based on the week of the challenge, from Sunday May 3rd when it began, all the way through to Sunday May 10th. The journaling challenge stopped on Wednesday 6th but I think it’s important to show a week of stats until I felt like the challenge had slowed and Instagram moved on to the next thing. The comparisons and stats are compared to the week before (26 Apr-2 May), which I’d say was a pretty average week for me on instagram in terms of content and engagement.
Overview
In total over the week, I uploaded 84 posts and stories to instagram. My reach was up +2461, at 4,551. Impressions were up a massive +17869, standing at 27,119. My total interactions (which are the actions taken on my account) was 699. 681 one of these were profile visits, up +536 from the usual week. Website clicks were up +13 to a total of 18 clicks.
Followers
I started the challenge at 1307 followers. My overall growth was 99 people; 119 people followed me and 20 unfollowed, bringing my total follower account to 1406. (At the time of screenshot, it showed my growth as +103 but a follower count of 1403. Instagram follow counts can change rapidly!).
What helped?
Having a shoutout and push from Daisy at MyGreenCow gave my engagement a massive boost on day 2. I was extremely grateful and it’s made me think that if I were to do another challenge, I’d actively ask friends and other creators to help give me a boost and ask if they’d shout me out. As it happened, Daisy decided to do so without me asking and I had a spike of 53 followers from her story share. We have similar creative audiences and a lot of Daisy’s content is craft and creative journaling, so it was a genuine shared interest. If other content creators match to your interest and challenge then I’d definitely reach out! It’s important to note though, that if someone shares your post or challenge and your target audiences are completely different, you won’t see much of an uptake. Even if you do, it’s unlikely they’ll stick around as they just won’t be into your content. They’re not your people - that’s OK!
Shouting out other inspiration accounts at the end of the challenge also helped. I did this simply to share other content that I loved but, in turn, they reshared my story post and I had another few followers come through.
I also want to add that this challenge wasn’t just a ‘quick win’ for me. I’m expecting a small proportion of the new followers to only be around short term, as perhaps they're only into journaling content whereas I share other creative avenues too, like painting and sketching. But I’m hoping that a big portion of them are my people - that they love creativity and are looking for lots of creative inspiration and different avenues. To have an uptake of followers and being able to grow my community with likeminded people is a massive win for me, and I’m very grateful they joined the clan!
Planning
A HUGE relief and something that took the pressure off me was planning. The main challenge of journaling was based on a blogpost I had written, which outlined how to art journal. The instagram challenge was an extension of that. The post covered everything in written form but the challenge allowed people to really see my process in action, join in and be inspired in that moment. I really encouraged my community to join in and used the blogpost I had written as pointers for my challenge content.
I had pre-written all my instagram captions and had some photos ready to go for my feed. As it happened, I ditched the photos and decided to create a stop-motion and a photo of the actual journal spread I was creating, as well as a photo with me in it to share during the challenge. But, I did have backups just in case I didn’t have the time to take those photos on the day. Having the captions and content planned, written and ready to go was a big help. It meant when I posted onto my Instagram grid in the evening, I didn’t have to worry. I just had to focus on the engagement afterwards. I could enjoy my time on instagram, looking through hashtags and finding further inspiration on art journaling. This was a big factor of looking after myself and making the evenings a little lighter after a day of creating content for the challenge.
Hashtag research
Linked with the above, I find hashtag research to be a bit of a chore for my instagram planning. Linking these with the pre-written captions and having them ready to go helped save time for me as well. I wanted to make sure they were different for every post, and ranging from large hashtags to small.
I also created my own hashtag for the challenge, which encouraged people to share their own creations to instagram. I loved this, and it got a lot of ‘sticker taps’ through from my stories so visibility was high. It was an easy way to see who had uploaded and engaged with the challenge in one place (but as I mentioned before, remember that not everyone will and that’s ok too!). I was chuffed to bits to get some uploads to this hashtag. Remember to choose one that’s unique to you and not linked with something else!
Time
I think looking from the outside in, it didn’t seem like it would be a huge time suck for me. Certainly going into it, I didn’t realise it would take up as much time as it did! My plan was to record a few videos, talk through my process and film what I would create anyway. I’d write and share a few more instagram posts than usual but that’s it... Oh boy! It took up a LOT more time than I realised. My phone told me my screen time was up 53% last week!!!
One area that took up more time than I thought was captioning my stories. Now I know that this is optional and not everyone does this, but I am a huge advocate in captioning any ‘sound on’ stories where I’m talking to the camera. It’s not only for those who don’t have their headphones in and would swipe past as they’d be missing all of the content coming just through audio, but also for those who are hard of hearing. It allows my content to be more inclusive and gives everyone a chance to receive it, so for me, it wasn’t an option to not caption my stories and I’ll always do so in the future.
The main area that took up the most amount of time was engagement! I wanted instagram to see my content, and I wanted people to know how excited I was. I clicked through hashtags, discovered gorgeous new accounts to follow and left lots of comments on beautiful posts. The whole challenge gave me a big boost in inspiration for myself because I gave myself the time to find it.
I didn’t do a big build up for this challenge though it’s absolutely recommended. If you’re doing one that ties in with something you’re launching, I really suggest building up to the challenge and growing momentum. Create countdowns and talk about your challenge constantly. Share dates and build up excitement in your grid, your newsletter, your twitter. Wherever you are, shout about it!
If I was to run another, I’d try and do this. I’ve learnt a lot through running this challenge - I mean I even forgot to share about it on my newsletter and other platforms! I think it would be beneficial for me to do so next time but I’m not mad I didn’t do it because I’ll know for the future (and I can tell you about doing it instead!)
Here are a few basic tips if you’re running an Instagram challenge:
Clear out your time so you can focus on the challenge. Realise that it WILL impact your other work, so if you can clear space, do so. It’s not worth being burned out by this if you’re trying to juggle everything at once!
Give yourself breathing space. It’s a big deal to record content and engage with your audience, and takes a lot of mental energy and pressure. I didn’t film it all, caption it and then share it straight away. While I did film each stage on different days, I didn’t share them until the following day so I had time in the afternoons to caption and prepare.
Clear some days off for afterwards, or at least fill them with light tasks. As an introvert, I knew that showing up in my stories, talking and being visible would be a big thing for me. My challenge ran from Sunday to Wednesday, so I made sure my business tasks for Thursday were kept light. Friday was a bank holiday, and then I had the weekend to chill. It’s surprising how something like this does zap your mental energy, especially if the results don’t seem like much to the viewer. But when you factor it all together and realise the work you’ve put in, it’s vital to give yourself some rest and recharge time too.
Linked to the above point, think about how long your challenge will be. Four days was enough for me and just right too. I planned and split my content into these stages so it was clear what each day would be for. I think going on longer would have been too much for me and I think small challenges are the way to go for my community too. Linked back to the poll I asked before I started the challenge, I knew not everyone had more time and so I factored this in. I made my videos relatively short and emphasised that you could spend as little or as long as you like on the prompts. Think about what would be a good timeframe and length for your challenge, for your audience as well as yourself.
Share the work of the people using your hashtag or who are participating in your challenge. The point of your challenge is to inspire - so shout them out! Tell them what you love about their post and their feed. Really encourage and share the love, this is what a challenge is all about.
Create graphics for your challenge. This will help you reshare them in the run up to your grid and keep consistent visuals so people will know what you’re talking about each time you share them. I created some quick story backgrounds for the challenge. I uploaded a title card before starting each day which in turn keeps it clear and easy to view for those accessing later in my story highlights.
In conclusion
It was a lot of work but I felt really connected to my community and followers. I was worried that people wouldn’t watch - that they’d switch off and not watch through my stories as the videos were too long. It’s natural to get a drop off on story views as you go along but I had a good consistent number of people who watched it all and I’m so grateful! It felt like a real sense of community spirit and I felt really confident in my teaching. It’s a topic I’m super passionate about and it made me feel so proud that I was inspiring so many!
I loved seeing people getting creative and using my tips and techniques, and sharing that they felt creative really made it worth it for me. My whole purpose is to encourage creativity and I love that this challenge really clarified that for me. My followers did go up quickly (and more than I usually get in a month!) and I’m hoping they love my content enough to stick around.
Overall, I loved it. I allowed enough time to recharge afterwards and did enough prep to feel like I wasn’t burning out. My biggest tip would be to plan and prep ahead as much as possible, and to enjoy what you’re doing!
I hope you found this post interesting and insightful. If you missed the instagram challenge and would like to take part, I’ve got each day saved into my highlights on my instagram page. Start with day 1 and I hope it gets you inspired! Use the hashtag (#katiesjournalchallenge) if you post to your grid, and I look forward to seeing what you create!
