How to Use Instagram Games to Supercharge Your Growth

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Have you ever played a quiz on Instagram Stories or participated in an Instagram Bingo? 

While those Instagram Games were enjoyable as a user, you’d be surprised to know they also benefit the brands behind them in many ways. 

Instagram has become an integral part of every business’s social media strategy, and for good reasons. It’s a great place to interact with your audience directly, establish your brand, and fine-tune it based on their needs. 

From Instagram live to stories and reels—the platform keeps coming up with new features to help you engage with your followers and expand your reach. 

If you want to try something different and give your profile a boost, Instagram Games could be the answer for you. They can help you increase your reach and promote your brand, all while making it fun for the audience. 

In this article, we’ll explore what Instagram Games are and how you can reap their benefits. We also have some fantastic game ideas you can implement right away! You can implement what you learn here on other platforms such as TikTok as well. 

What are Instagram games? 

Instagram Games are not like the games you play on Facebook or Snapchat or others that you can download on your phone.

Instead, they’re more like challenges for your followers. You give your audience easy and fun tasks to do, providing all the necessary rules. Those who complete the tasks emerge as the winners and get a prize—it can be as little as a shoutout to as big as a tangible gift.

Also read: Instagram Challenges: What Are They, How to Execute Them, and More

Games on Instagram are an effective way to make your audience aware of and interested in your brand. 

They are also cost-effective—all you practically need to do is develop a creative game that aligns with your brand and your followers would enjoy. Your audience can manage the rest and take the game forward. 

Even if increasing engagement rate and traffic is not your end goal, you can still use Instagram Games to break the monotony on your feed. They are a great way to enrich the content on your profile and impress new and old visitors.

How can you create Instagram games?

Instagram Games are undoubtedly fun and entertaining, but that doesn’t mean they require no preparation. To enjoy the benefits they can bring, you need to give your games considerable thought. 

Now, there are many ways you can create your own Instagram Game—start a new challenge or play quick games with your followers on your IG stories. Or post a small game on your feed to engage people and get them to comment on your post. 

This, too, has many benefits—it makes for a great post, helps spice up your feed, and can get you significant traction. 

Whatever you choose, it’s essential to plan your game and the content associated with it properly to see quantifiable results. Here are some tips to help you through the process:

1. Decide your goal 

First of all, you need to be clear about the reason why you’re posting a game or challenge. 

Your goal could be to get more traffic on your page or gain followers. One way of doing this is by asking participants to tag more people or get them to follow you, as Meshki does here. This strategy helps new people discover your content and products. 

Or your reason to use games could be to promote products, like Country Bean here. They came out with a contest to promote their latest product – coffee mugs. 

This way, your brand, and products reach new people, some of whom might convert into followers or customers.  

You could even post a game to interact with your followers and get to know them. That’s what Tiggle does here. It’s a simple game, but it helps in brand building and engagement.

The point is to be clear about your goal from the beginning. This will help you create and deliver the game better. Moreover, it will give you a basis to assess your performance and the success of your game.

2. Make the game engaging

The most crucial aspect of your Instagram Game is that it should intrigue and engage your audience. It should look and sound fun for users to get involved in it. 

Remember: their participation determines the success of it all.  

So, think out of the box to create your game and be as creative as you can. Use puns, emojis, GIFs, and anything which seems exciting and aligns with your brand to make it interesting. Also, keep the following points in mind:

• Think from the audience’s perspective—what will they find interesting and be willing to do?

• Prepare clear and concise instructions for the game. Leave no scope for doubt. 

• Pay attention to visuals—make the poster or template for your game eye-catching. 

Lifestyle Stores’ contest below is the perfect example of attractive visuals and short and crisp instructions. 

• Make the challenge open to as many people as possible. For instance, don’t involve props that might not be easily accessible for everyone. 

Half your battle is won when you have a good idea about the game you want to create.  

3. Put your brand forward 

Your audience must know the challenge is coming from you—so, make sure to use your brand name and logo in all content related to the game. 

This is important because users should know who they can reach out to in case of any queries. 

Then, even if you don’t mention your logo or name, people might enjoy your challenge just the same. However, you will risk missing out on the added reach, visibility, and followers the challenge can bring you. 

So, create branded content for your challenge. Sampler here is a great example of the same. 

An excellent way to make your challenge stand out is to create a unique hashtag for it. This is what Kernowcraft did below.

You can ask all participants to follow this hashtag and use it in their entry for the challenge. 

This will help you and the participants track participation and results. It will also help you assess the performance of your challenge better. And you’ll reduce the chances of missing any entry as they will all be collected in one place. 

While creating a hashtag for your challenge, make sure it’s new and not already in use. This way, the hashtag will only contain posts and stories from your challenge only and won’t get flooded with unrelated posts. 

4. Entice your audience 

Let your audience know what they’ll gain from participating in your game and why they should give it a shot. If your challenge involves a winner, make the winning criteria and perks clear.  

Now, you can incentivize your audience by attaching a prize to your games—like free goodies or a gift card, as shown below. 

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Or you can give a shoutout to participants and reshare their posts on your stories or Instagram post.

You can choose any incentive that you like as long as it meets your purpose and budget. 

Lastly, it’s best to include the incentives in the same place where you mention the rules. Again, be clear and concise. People should have no doubt about what the challenge entails and how they’ll benefit from it. 

5. Keep it simple

It goes without saying but keep your game as simple as possible. A complicated or long-drawn one can tire people out and make them lose interest. This, in turn, will affect your game’s reach and success. 

To begin with, limit the number of tasks and instructions your challenge involves. Then, ensure the tasks in themselves don’t require a lot of work. 

At all steps, provide total clarity to your audience and leave no space for gray areas.

Remember: the key to a successful Instagram game is to make it simple yet engaging. It can be as simple as the one shown below and still invite good engagement. 

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Now that you know what goes into creating an Instagram game let’s explore some game ideas you can use to supercharge your Instagram growth!

5 Instagram story game ideas to supercharge your profile growth

The pandemic has businesses fighting for attention on social media with everyone spending a chunk of their time online, especially on Instagram. Here, including games in your Instagram strategy can majorly amp up your social media game and get significant results.

While you should experiment and be creative with your games, some game ideas never fail to impress the audience. Here are a few of them:

1. This or That

A ‘This or That’ challenge can never go wrong. The rules are simple—in fact, the template itself conveys what users have to do. 

There are two ways you can do this challenge—either post it on your feed, asking your followers to drop their preference in the comments. That’s how Barr Cosmetics does it here. 

Or, you can ask participants to take a screenshot of the template, repost it on their Instagram profile with their preferences highlighted, and tag you. 

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This challenge is exciting for the audience and helps you get to know them better. 

2. Story quizzes and polls

Instagram’s poll and quiz stickers are excellent ways to engage your audience and enhance your brand presence. 

You can create quizzes around your brand—this helps people learn more about you but in an exciting way. 

For instance, you can do a series of ‘Two Truths and A Lie’ or ‘How well do you know us?’ quizzes. Here’s an example of this.

If not this, you can create industry-related quizzes to engage your audience and understand their preferences, as shown below.  

Quizzes are a great way to entertain people and make them look forward to your content. 

As for polls, they don’t only engage your followers but also gauge their opinions. For instance, Bonkers Corner regularly plays games on their stories, asking their followers to choose between multiple options. This can help them understand their audience’s tastes better and plan accordingly. 

Quizzes and polls take just a few minutes of people’s time but still provide a fun experience. Given how quick and effortless they are, users are likely to participate in them. 

3. Bingo

Bingo is a game where you mention a set of activities in boxes, and people tick off the ones they’ve done or experienced. They are always trending on Instagram, and you should leverage them for your brand. 

For this, you need to create an on-brand Bingo template. You can either post it on your story or feed. Your audience will have to take a screenshot,  mark off the boxes they relate with, and tag you as they repost it. 

This is how Coffee Bean created a Coffee Bingo for their audience:

This game idea is fun and can help get the word out about your brand. 

4. Tag a friend

‘Tag a friend’ or ‘Nominate friends’ can take various forms. 

To begin with, create a template with a list of habits or situations. Ask the participants to take a screenshot, tag a friend against each situation and post it on their profiles. 

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Or you can make the nomination of friends a step in your challenge. You can even ask your followers to tag friends to pass on the challenge further. As their friends complete the challenge, they’ll tag more people, and the challenge will move forward, getting more traction to your profile.

In any case, getting people to tag others can help increase your profile’s reach and visibility—a smart marketing tactic to drive engagement.

5. Contests

Besides short games, you can also launch full-fledged contests on Instagram. They don’t only help engage your audience but also promote your brand and products. 

For instance, Estelle Colored Glass here promoted their latest products through a contest. 

The rules of contests are usually simple. You can make people post pictures with your product or follow and tag you to participate. 

The idea of contests and competitions fascinates many people—using them can end up working in your favor. If you want to take it to the next level, you can also contribute with influencers to amp up your reach.

There are so many contests ideas that work on Instagram. You should try it (or rather them) out. These include trivia and selfie challenges. 

Conclusion

Instagram Games are an excellent opportunity to do exactly what you join social media platforms for— connect with your audience and build your brand presence. 

They help market your brand without looking overly promotional and provide a fun experience to your audience—a win-win for everybody. 

Use this article as a reference to create engaging games for your Instagram handle. If you’re ever running out of inspiration, you can always start with the evergreen game ideas mentioned above.