This article was originally written by me for The Platform Blog.
After returning to base our lovely Instagrammers posed with their well deserved prizes Our Instagram Scavenger Hunt event was flagged as one of the top 5 recommended events for Social Media Week London and it was a great incentive to ensure we made it exceptional, and enjoyable. We’re great fans of Instagram here and lots of us use it personally but we also recommend it for clients because it tells a story visually, something which is often overlooked when it comes to creating digital assets. Story telling was one of our objectives for the event; we chose the London Instagram Meetup communityas partners for a scavenger hunt to build a social footprint for us which tells people about where we live in London. Based on Kingsway, we’re sandwiched between theatreland and the Royal Courts of Justice and surrounded by world famous architecture, statues, landmarks and even chocolate boutiques, so the area is great fodder for photography. Scavenger hunts are an enduring favourite in the world of social media as they are fun and engaging and also a low-tech form of gamification. Groups of people are challenged to solve a number of clues against the clock, photograph the answers and post them online. This works well at events when groups are let loose on the locale for 30 minutes or so and return with a collection of images. We chose Instagram as the visual platform for our event because it’s a great for producing cool looking images plus it gave the challenge a new edge. The mechanics of the hunt were simple, sign up and show up. Entrants were tasked with a 10 stop tour of Covent Garden and Holborn; they were given a series of cryptic clues which they had to solve and once they had, photograph the answer. There were some really great photos along the way and the winning images were rewarded with prizes including champagne, whiskey and other goodies. Images were posted on Instagram using our hashtag #SMW_FH with our ‘hunt leader’ monitoring proceedings from back at FH towers. Prizes were awarded in categories including Best Photo, Fastest Team and Best Team Photo among others, congratulations to our prize winners, dianakakkar, igerslondon, ef61,lesscherry, shinesquad, arturring, and onemanand. From a UGC perspective, the activity delivered really well; 12 people joined the event and within one hour we had over 120 high quality images, tagged and posted on instagram. This shows that getting great fresh content just needs the right ingredients to do it successfully. Our key thoughts on what those ingredients to create successful UGC activity are: – set your objectives and desired outcomes – choose your platform and understand how to make it work best for you – create a strong theme and publicise the event – work with established social communities – create a short burst of activity for maximum impact – incentivise if you can and reward entrants with social recognition (tweets, likes and so on) – amplify content across your own digital and social channels And finally, here are some of the images collected on the scavenger journey around WC2.
A huge thank you to all of our enthusiastic Instagrammers for contributing to such a fantastic event, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. |
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