Meta Platforms : Instagram Best Practices to Reach Your Supporters

As you prepare for your upcoming election, you may consider leveraging Instagram to engage with new supporters. This blog post outlines organic and paid best practices that can help your campaign effectively reach and engage supporters and voters using Instagram.

Organic best practices

Inspire supporters with Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are easy to deploy, engaging, and one of the best ways to connect with your supporters. Create a beginning, middle, and end journey through the photos and videos you post to capture your audience and invite them into your campaign.

Share photos and videos of moments throughout your day; Remember, the 'boring' moments to you and your candidate are fascinating to your supporters. Think about sharing your go-to playlists while on the road or where you're stopping off for lunch. Invite potential supporters to ask the candidate questions directly via the questions sticker or assess public interest in an issue using the polling features. When you've posted enough stories, go through your archive and create an Instagram Highlight telling the story of your campaign.

Check out our Instagram Stories Playbook for a look at how other partners around the world are using stories to capture their audience's attention.

Captivate attention with Instagram Reels

Reels is the place to get creative. Record and edit multi-clip videos about what matters to you. Make them fun, catchy and meaningful for your supporters by using trending audio or collaborating with others on the campaign trail. View our Instagram Reels Playbook to help you get inspired.

As a reminder, ads about social issues, elections and politics are not supported on Reels at this time.

Get closer to your supporters with Instagram Live

Go Live to connect directly with viewers. Increase the number of viewers by promoting your Lives ahead of time (or regularly going Live one night a week) and inviting special guests to join you using Live Rooms. When going live, be sure to take questions directly from your audience using the Q&A feature.

For more information on going Live, check out Instagram's Video Playbook.

Leverage hashtags to reach new supporters

Hashtags on Instagram are an effective way to categorize your content and organize your supporters. You can think about creating your own hashtag and including it in all of your posts, stories or Reels to consistently raise awareness about your campaigns.

Be creative with your posts

Use your Instagram Feed to visually tell your story and inspire potential voters. Keep your message simple and don't forget to post often. Remember to include important information about voter registration deadlines, polling locations and election day updates directly in the captions.

Instagram's Main Guide for Politics and Government can help you create your digital strategy for the campaign.

For more organic resources, visit our website.

Paid best practices

Don't overthink your ad creative

Our biggest rule? Don't overthink your content. Advertising on Instagram doesn't have to involve multiple days of content production.

That photo of your candidate at an ice cream shop that you shot on your cell phone? This could be a great, relatable photo to utilize in a paid acquisition campaign. The 10-second vertical video of your candidate meeting with farmers? Promote it via Instagram Stories with a swipe up to learn more about relevant agriculture policies.

Learn more about our creative best practices here.

Expand tailored audiences through our advertising tools

Allow our advertising tools to work for you. When targeting new audiences, explore using tactics such as lookalike targeting, or custom audience targeting, to expand your reach. A lookalike audience can help you reach new people because they share similar characteristics to the existing audience segment. Custom audience targeting can target people who have interacted with your content on Meta technologies.

For example, if you had a bill that was sports-related, targeting a group of people who are interested in sports in your district may populate a small segment. Expand the segment through a lookalike audience, where you'll maximize your impact. You can then also target it to people who have interacted with your account in the past.

Candidates and political organizations are responsible for complying with the applicable electoral laws in their jurisdiction. Please consult your political activities counsel with questions specific to your jurisdiction.