The advantage of simple contests is they’re great for growth and exposure. When you ask your existing Instagram audience to “tag a friend below,” that friend will receive a notification. If that person wants to join the contest, they have to follow your account, like the content, and tag somebody else. It becomes a reciprocal process.

More complicated contests may involve your audience creating content for Instagram, be it as a story or a feed post. In these types of contests, you’ll want people to:

These types of contests aren’t only more complicated for people to participate in, but also more time-consuming for you to manage. You have to monitor the hashtag and mentions to track who’s submitting entries for that contest.