Instagram Takeover: How to Host a Takeover in 6 Steps?

What is an Instagram Takeover?

An Instagram takeover is the process of taking over someone else’s Instagram account temporarily and sharing marketing content with their audience. Instagram takeovers are an incredible way for brands, individuals and influencers to collaborate and cross-promote content.

Takeovers started with brands allowing other Instagrammers to post photos to their feeds for a short period of time and have continued to evolved alongside Instagram’s feature set. Video, Stories and live video updates have all added new, and exciting, dimensions to Instagram takeovers.

6 Steps to Do a Successful Instagram Takeover

Set goals

Getting clear on what do you want to accomplish, will help with your whole strategy, starting from who will host the takeover and ending with the metrics you should use to measure your success.

Your Instagram takeover’s aims can be:

• Boosting brand awareness. This can be measured by followers’ growth in your Instagram account.
• Promoting a new product, service or an event. This can be measured by a number of event attendees, traffic to your digital website or amount of conversions.
• Increasing engagement with community. This can be measured by a number of interactions, such as likes, comments, views or link clicks as a result of the takeover.

Choose your host

Once a decision regarding the goal is made, it is time to select the right person who will help to improve your Instagram marketing strategy and meet your aim.

Most probably that when you imagine your takeover’s dream host, you think about your industry’s influencer or celebrity. Although popularity and a million of followers seems like the first thing to which you need to pay attention, but this is not true.

Without a doubt, the bigger amount of followers your host has, means the higher exposure your brand can get. However, followers’ number isn’t the most important thing.

Decide on the type of a takeover

So, you need to answer several main questions about takeover’s content with your host:

• What kind of content will be shared during a takeover? (Will a host create the Instagram posts, go live with your account or post in your Stories?)
• When are you hosting a takeover? (Will it last one hour, one day or even a whole week?)
• How often takeover’s content will be uploaded? (If you know active hours of your audience, provide a content’s schedule to a host to ensure that he/she will post when your audience is most engaged.)
• What hashtags will be used? (Will you create one unique hashtag to promote a takeover?)

Figure out your access plan

Another important thing that you need to consider is how much access you want to give to your takeover’s host. Although it is ideal when you can rely on the host who takes over your Instagram account, but you should be careful with sharing the password, there are chances that your marketing account may be compromised.

What you can do in this case, is to create and give a temporary password to your host. Don’t forget to change it after your Instagram takeover ended.

Promote your takeover

There are several ways of promoting an Instagram takeover:

• Promote on Instagram. You may announce your takeover through Instagram post or Instagram Story. Keep in mind that promotion using Instagram post is considered as more effective because there are more users who will scroll through their Instagram feed rather than watch Instagram Stories.
• Announce on other social media channels. In addition to promoting on Instagram, you could also announce your takeover on other social channels, such as Facebook, Twitter or even Snapchat. In this way, you will grab attention of a wider audience and send them to your Instagram takeover.
• Ask your host to co-promote. You can give pictures to a host of your takeover, so he will share with his audience too.

Analyze the results

Once your Instagram takeover is over, don’t be tempting to relax thinking that it was a successful takeover.

You shouldn’t skip an important step which is to review the performance of your Instagram takeover. And use this knowledge to determine what you can do differently during the next takeover.

Remember, measurement is the key to learn and grow. Analyze the results of your takeover. Find out what you did well and what needs to be improved.