If you’re not in the Loop, don’t worry – it’s a fairly new concept and we hope that this blog will give you a bit of insight into what it is and how Loops on Instagram work.
An Instagram Loop is a growth strategy which helps a business page to gain more followers. There’s often a giveaway or incentive to join in and is related to your type of business / sector. Essentially, the idea allows you to find other businesses like yours and use each other as a spring board to find more followers and more awareness for other pages in your Loop. This growth strategy can see great results for new pages, or pages with a low following.
Sounds interesting, tell me more!
There are 2 types of Loop – a Giveaway Loop and an Influencer Loop.
For a Giveaway Loop, the organiser will create an image showing the prize that’s up for grab – which is something from each of the business pages in that Loop. The Loop will have a unique hashtag and will consist of around 5-10 businesses that contribute to the giveaway. Each person within the Loop will then share the image and tags on the next business in the image. There are guidelines involved for how you enter, so that the entrants follow the competition around in a Loop. This information is shared ahead of the scheduled Loop start time which details who’s involved, hashtags and what’s up for grabs. This ensures that all of the profiles involved benefit from the exposure – and everyone stays in the loop!
Here’s how it works:
Starting at 9am GMT on Monday morning, the Giveaway Loop begins:
Business 1 tags Business 2
Business 2 tags Business 3
Business 3 tags Business 4
Business 4 tags Business 5
Business 5 tags Business 1
Some of the rules:
- It’s really important that everyone posts at the exact same time – therefore confirmations of time zones are essential so that entrants don’t break the Loop.
- The same image must be shared with the same copy, so that it’s clear to the audience how to enter and how to follow the Loop in order to win the prize.
- The entrants are asked to follow each of the profiles in the Loop as well as the image in order to be in with a chance of winning.
- At the end of the competition, a winner is chosen.
How is this different to an Influencer Loop?
An Influencer Loop in some ways is more helpful to the audience and helps them to find other pages that they may genuinely ‘Like’. For example, if you’re interested in ideas to keep your kids entertained in the school holidays – many profiles will have different ideas about activities, events and ways to stimulate your little ones. Being able to find lots of ideas from different profiles is great for the audience.
Is a Loop right for my business?
You can expect to find new followers for your business profile but you’ll need to do your research as to what the right Loop is for your business and make a judgement about whether a Giveaway is right for you. It could be a really good opportunity to ‘team up’ with like-minded businesses to grow your audience. The more specific you can make your Loop, the more genuine you can expect your followers to be. These followers will be people who will stay liking your profile and your posts long after the competition has ended.
One of the ways that you can try to prevent someone unfollowing your profile after the competition has ended is to remove / untag the businesses in the Loop when the competition has closed. This will make it more difficult for people to follow the Loop again – but with the opposite reaction.
Keep posting relevant, interesting posts to your profile and keep your audience interested after the Loop has ended – hopefully your audience will be interested enough to buy from you and will share your profile or business freely.
You need to be aware of fake profiles, foreign accounts or being lured into a Loop which may not be genuine, so make sure that you do your research first.
If you’re looking for support to grow your audience, want to learn more about the in’s and out’s of Social Media – get in touch for a chat with the Social Progress team.