Challenge

In the fall of 2013, Kiwi Collection, the largest independent collection of international luxury hotels and booking specialists offering travel guidance and special offers to members, had launched an Instagram account and was looking to grow its follower base.

While the company had started sharing photos of its collection of hotels in order to highlight its many offerings, it found that it wasn’t seeing enough engagement or growth. It needed a compelling way to drive traffic to its Instagram page and get people talking about its properties.

Solution + Strategy

Kiwi Collection decided to run a hashtag-based Instagram contest called #KiwiMoments to encourage users to share their best travel photos from Kiwi Collection hotels around the world. Entrants were encouraged to follow Kiwi Collection on Instagram, and to post their best photos with the hashtag #KiwiMoments.

Kiwi Collection hosted the contest on its Facebook page, where participants could also enter and share their entry with friends to request votes. Powered by Strutta’s social promotions platform, entries could be submitted either through Kiwi Collection’s contest page on Facebook or with a hashtagged Instagram post. All photos correctly hashtagged on Instagram were automatically pulled into a Facebook photo gallery within the contest page.

Kiwi Collection promoted it with Facebook ads, as well as through its own channels including a newsletter and its website. The owner of the photo receiving the most votes was awarded a 5-night stay in the Dominican Republic at the luxurious Sivory Punta Cana Boutique Hotel.

Results

The contest succeeded in growing Kiwi Collection’s Instagram account by 50% during the promotion, and another 100% in the month following the contest.

Sharing was particularly effective in driving traffic to the contest – an additional 54% of visits occurred by way of referring links, and every share resulted in 10.2 clicks.

Overall, in a period of 22 days, the promotion garnered:

• 118 entries
• 3390 visits to the contest page
• 826 votes

It also gave Kiwi Collection a solid foundation on Instagram with a collection of engaged fans and beautiful photos.