Advent calendar on Instagram: Tips for you as an influencer

The Advent season is not only about baking cookies and Christmas shopping – an advent calendar is also essential for the festive season. We are not only talking about advent calendars filled with chocolate or with hand-selected items by yourself for your loved ones, but also an advent calendar on Instagram. A must-have for you as an influencer to sweeten the Christmas season for your followers and to increase your reach. In this article, we explain how to create your own advent calendar on Instagram.

Opportunities for advent calendars on Instagram

If you want to offer daily content on Instagram in the run-up to Christmas, you can start your own advent calendar as an influencer. If you are willing to invest a lot of time and work in your Insta advent calendar, you can provide a new door for your followers to open every day. What’s behind the doors depends a bit on your content type, the size of your budget, and the number of items you want to give away.

Advent calendar contests and giveaways

Typically, most influencers organize advent calendar contests. They give away products from collaborations with companies or some of their favourite items. It might be a good time to see which products you would like to share with your followers, especially at the end of the year. You can then give them away as part of an advent calendar contest. It is not always feasible to give away products every day – so you can also give something away every few days and tease the next giveaway on the “break days”.

Another option for an Instagram advent calendar is to provide tutorials. For instance, a festive evening makeup look, a recipe for your favourite Christmas cookies, or instructions for handmade Christmas cards. A beautiful graphic that you create with Canva or a similar tool and a suitable quote or saying will undoubtedly please your followers as well. A gift guide can also be combined with a giveaway. The sky is the limit as far as imagination goes! This type of advent calendar campaign can also be combined well with product giveaways.

Less work, more reach: “Advent calendar sharing”

What can also be advantageous is to collaborate and take turns with other influencers. This is how German influencer @janasdiary did it, for example. In December 2020, she took turns with her husband @leon_dude and opened a door on the even days; he, in turn, on the odd days. They both gave away products on their accounts. One of the benefits is that it is only half as much work in content production for each account. At the same time, by linking the profiles, your reach can be increased because you give each other new followers. Such a joint Insta advent calendar is also doable with more than two participants.

Collaborations with brands for an advent calendar on Instagram

If you’re one of those influencers who can’t or don’t want to open a new door for followers every day, promotions like the German cosmetics store Douglas did in 2020 are just what one needs. Twenty-four influencers raffled off their favourite Douglas products every day on their own Instagram accounts. Douglas, in turn, was able to present the products on its own Facebook and Instagram page as well as tag the respective influencers. This helps boost your Instagram reach.

And what happens after the advent calendar?

Contests on Instagram often bring a lot of new followers and new reach. A common problem, however, is that many of the new followers are gone after the contest is over. They quickly unfollow the profile when there is nothing left to gain. But you can counteract this problem by maintaining the quality of your content all year round and not just expecting quick success from an Instagram Advent calendar.

Advent calendar contests are not about giving away as many expensive products as possible. It’s the thought that counts. Show your followers that you care about them not only through material products but also through high-quality content that they would like to see.

Advent calendar on Instagram: Plan early!

If you’re planning to start an advent calendar promotion on Instagram, you should start planning early. If you decide at the end of November that you’d also like to benefit from the advent calendar boom on Instagram, it could be too late. If you want to offer your advent calendar with daily posts, you’ll need some lead time to come up with creative content ideas and shoot the footage or even videos for it. It’s best to start planning as early as October. That way, you have enough time to enjoy the Advent season yourself and don’t get bogged down in content stress.

If you want to get a collaboration as part of an advent calendar campaign from a company, you should take action even earlier. Such marketing campaigns by companies and brands are usually planned in the summer when most of us are not even thinking about Christmas yet. But even after that, it never hurts to keep your eyes open – some companies also award collaborations at short notice before the Christmas season.

You can find out what rules you need to follow when entering an Instagram contest in this blog article.

We hope you have fun planning your Advent calendar!

We at stylink have also been working on something. So, stay tuned until December!