Thinking of asking a celebrity or industry leader to take over your Instagram account? Contributor Cley Williams shares 8 steps to help ensure it’s a success.
Instagram takeovers are a great and mutually beneficial way for brands and influencers to work together.
To make the most of an influencer’s huge audience base, many brands are collaborating with them and allowing them to take over their Instagram accounts for a brief period of time to showcase their personality and signature style while sharing promotional content. These so-called Instagram takeovers are becoming an increasingly popular marketing strategy for brands looking to grow their audience and find new ways to promote their content.
With Instagram advertising features such as Stories and video, there’s so much you can do to make the most of Instagram takeovers.
To ensure success, here are eight key steps to remember for a successful Instagram takeover.
1. Identify your goals
Brands need to first outline what they want to achieve through an Instagram takeover. These goals can range from user engagement to product or event promotion and brand awareness.
Focusing on getting the most out of user engagement makes it easier to track improvement in terms of likes, comments and messages. If the focus is on launching products, services or events, improvement in website traffic and conversion can quickly be traced to determine the success of the takeover. An increase in brand awareness can be tracked through a surge of more followers or an increase in views and mentions.
The most important thing to remember is that knowing what these goals are early on sets the tone for what you want to achieve and how the takeover is done. Tracking specific metrics throughout also outlines the success of the takeover.
2. Choose the right influencer
Once you have successfully identified which goals and metrics to base the takeover on, the next step is to decide on the right host or influencer to take over your account. A host can be any sort of social media influencer — such as a photographer, blogger, fashion guru or any industry expert who relates well to your brand.
To get the best results from the Instagram takeover, these hosts and influencers for the brand need to have a huge online following on their own that aligns to your brand’s target audience to maximize the reach of the takeover.
It’s important for brands to already have a clear idea of what their target audience is. Social media influencers usually already have a huge following on their own, and brands looking to expand their content reach and get their brand exposed to a new audience can use this as leverage.
3. Identify the type of takeover
Once you’ve decided on the right influencer, the next step is identifying the type of Instagram takeover to use. Instagram has announced a variety of features that make it easier to promote content. From getting these influencers featured in your account’s Instagram Stories to getting them to go live on your account, knowing what works best for your brand is essential.
Instagram Stories makes it easier for your host and influencers to take over your account without needing to post on your gallery. Live videos are another feature to explore and can work as alternative content that can be posted by your brand’s guest influencers.
Influencers can post content on your Instagram feed in different ways depending on what kind of content you want them to post and what your brand’s goals may be.
4. Set the timeline for the takeover
Set the length of time you want for the takeover. Instagram post takeovers often take a week, live videos can last for a few hours, and Stories can be set for a day. Talk this through with your guest influencer, and make arrangements as necessary to ensure that you’re on the same page.
5. Make use of hashtags
Create a specific hashtag for your Instagram takeover that your followers can use to respond through posts and feedback. An increase in user engagement as a result of the takeover can be measured in terms of the number of people using your brand’s takeover hashtag in their posts and comments. This makes it easier for you to monitor the success of your campaign in the long run.
6. Promote your influencer’s takeover
Announce the takeover to your audience to get the best chance of having them check out all related content on your feed and go through your Instagram stories. Take two weeks to inform your audience about the takeover to generate buzz about it and create enough interest to draw the attention of your audience.
7. Promote the Instagram takeover on other social media platforms
Get more exposure for the takeover and promote it on Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat to ensure all your followers know about it, including those who may not have Instagram accounts. It’s important to promote your brand through different platforms and keep all your followers in the know through different social channels.
8. Measure results
Once the takeover is completed, it’s equally important to measure the results of the Instagram takeover. Go back to your initial goals and track the improvement in terms of an increase in followers, user engagement and traffic for your external site or other social media channels. You can make the most of third-party analytics reporting tools to keep track of the metrics you’ve outlined at the start of your campaign.
These eight steps will help ensure the success of your brand’s takeover and give you the best chance of getting the most exposure. But ultimately, having a clear vision of what you want to achieve through the takeover and identifying specific indicators to measure later on will drive the success of your campaign. And the most important thing is finding the right social media influencer who identifies with your brand and who can bring in the best responses to your takeover, as this sets the tone for whether or not you get the results you’re expecting.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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