Carolina is beautiful any time of year, but there’s something extra special about spring. To show off our blooming campus on social media, we decided to host a photo contest, similar to the #UNCFall contest we held in November. We solicited photo submissions on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, asking people to tag them with #UNCSpring. We awarded a gift card for a local restaurant to one person each day during the contest and then offered one grand prize – camera lenses for a phone and a UNC-branded mobile charger.
The contest launched on a Tuesday and we accepted photos through the following Friday. The contest generated nearly three dozen original submissions – not bad, but not nearly as many as we had hoped for and not nearly as many as our #UNCFall contest generated. More than 70 people, however, tagged their previously posted spring photos with #UNCSpring so we decided to count those in our contest as well. This indicated to us that maybe we should have held the contest a week or two earlier when the flowers and trees were starting to bloom.
Still, we had plenty of beautiful spring photos so we decided to show them off by creating a Facebook photo album with 16 of our favorite submissions. Then we asked our fans to vote for their favorite photo by liking it. The person who submitted the most-liked photo was our grand prize winner. To give the contest a boost, we reached out through social media to the people who submitted the photos to let them know where they (and their friends) could vote.
The Facebook album was a hit. Here are the numbers:
- 182 shares
- 27 positive comments
- 1,000+ positive reactions
- The winning photo received 177 votes
For comparison, the #UNCSpring contest photo album was shared two times more than the #UNCFall album. And, the spring photo album had a 62 percent increase in comments and had a 35 percent increase in post likes over the fall photo album. Plus, the photo contest was featured in a case study that highlights UNC’s Twitter account.
Here’s a look at the winning photo, submitted by IG user @amandaklee16.
