One of the biggest challenges we have had with Instagram promotions has been contacting winners. Instagram had no way to privately contact potential winners to notify them that they won – which led to potential to fraud when we were forced to post a public comment to notify winners.

Marden-Kane came up with a workaround to this problem, which involved asking people to verify their account when they contacted us. This worked out fine – but we prefer to not announce winners in public until they have actually been cleared as a winner.

So the news that Instagram had launched a service with direct messaging capabilities called Instagram Direct is GREAT news for promotions.

This is how the new Instagram Direct service can work for notifying a winner in a promotion:
1. A winner can be sent a photo privately.
2. If the winner is already following the account that is doing the winner notifications, the winner will receive a message in their private inbox. If they aren’t following that account, the message will receive a pending request the potential winner can view and respond to.
3. The potential winner can then respond privately to you.

This should alleviate problems. Like people seeing a post about Joe Smith being a winner, and emailing us saying that they are Joe Smith when they are not him.

Instagram Direct clears the way for promotions to be even more streamlined on the Instagram platform. For our other tips on running a successful Instagram promotion see our article 3 Things to Consider Before Running an Instagram Promotion or use this handy infographic:

For help in running a promotion on Instagram, or utilizing our Instagram (or Facebook or Twitter) feed capture services, contact us.

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