Hashtag Campaign Brief, 30-day blueprint

The mechanics of a single hashtag push are covered in how to run a UGC hashtag campaign. This is the operating calendar: what happens in each of the four weeks, who does it, and what you report at the end.

Pre-launch brief

Everything that goes wrong in week three was decided in the brief. It should fit on one page and be readable by the social team, the customer service team and whoever approves the prize. The template below is the minimum. Idukki has a free hashtag brief generator if you want a starting draft.

Choosing the hashtag

• Unique. Search it on Instagram and TikTok before you commit. If it already has thousands of unrelated posts, your entries will drown and your moderators will drown with them.
• Brand-first and short. Put the brand name in it so it cannot be confused, and keep it short enough to type on a phone without mistakes.
• Disclosed if there is a prize. The FTC's endorsement FAQ says a hashtag like #XYZ_Rocks does not tell readers a post was made to enter a contest, and that adding the word "contest" or "sweepstakes" to the hashtag should be enough (it says "sweeps" probably is not). Ask entrants to put it near the start of the caption.
• One hashtag, not three. Every extra hashtag splits entries and adds another collection to monitor.

Set up collection before launch, not after. In Idukki, create a collection from the Instagram hashtag, the TikTok hashtag and posts that tag your account, so entries flow into one queue from the first hour. If you are building collection yourself on the Instagram API, note Meta's limit: an Instagram professional account can query at most 30 unique hashtags in a rolling seven-day period. The rights step needs setting up too: a registration form that entrants can complete once, linked from the terms, is easier than asking every entrant individually later. The full rights workflow is covered on rights management.

Live pulse: the daily 10-minute review

For the 21 days the campaign is open, one person spends ten minutes a day in the queue at the same time. The routine matters more than the tool: a feed reviewed every morning produces usable content, while a feed reviewed once a week produces a backlog nobody clears. The ritual has four steps, in this order.

1. 1Sort (3 minutes). Approve posts that meet the brief, reject the rest. Do not debate edge cases here; flag them for the weekly review.
2. 2Clear (2 minutes). Send rights requests to every approved post from someone who has not already granted rights. The sooner you ask, the more likely the creator is still engaged.
3. 3Tag (3 minutes). Link each approved post to the products visible in it. An approved, cleared post with no product tag cannot sell anything.
4. 4Spot (2 minutes). Note the one or two posts that are outperforming (comments, saves, shares) and pass them to whoever runs Stories and ads that day.

Automation takes the dull part of the sort away. In Idukki, incoming posts are screened for profanity and scored for sentiment, and they arrive pending rather than live. Posts from creators who have already granted rights through the rights workflow arrive approved, so repeat entrants from your seed list skip the queue. Collections re-sync automatically (new ones catch up quickly, established ones refresh daily) and can be synced on demand when you need the latest entries before a feature slot.

Mid-campaign, usually around day 10, entries tail off. Re-prompt with a theme ("show us your weekend set-up") and feature a few entrants by name. Featuring people is the strongest signal that entering is worthwhile, and it costs nothing. Ideas for keeping entries coming without paying for them are in how to get more UGC without paying.

Post-launch retargeting and reuse

Week four is where the campaign earns its keep. Close entries on the stated date, announce winners as the terms said you would, and move the cleared posts into the channels that sell. Check the scope of each permission as you go: a yes for your website is not a yes for paid ads, and anything you plan to run as an ad needs that use in its permission.

A note on audiences, because this is often misunderstood: posts are not audiences. What Meta lets you build is an engagement custom audience from people who followed or interacted with your Instagram professional account, or who watched your videos on Facebook or Instagram, and a lookalike from a source audience such as those engagers or your customer list. Use campaign posts as the creative shown to those audiences. For creative testing, see sourcing UGC for paid ads, and for email, UGC in email and Klaviyo flows.

Measure and report at day 30

There is no reliable public benchmark for what a hashtag campaign "should" produce, because results depend on audience size, prize, category and how much the brand promotes it. So do not report against someone else's number. Set a baseline before launch (how many usable posts per month you collect today, what your top PDPs convert at) and report the campaign against that. The scorecard below separates activity from assets from outcomes, so a big post count does not hide a small usable library.

The on-site line is the one finance will ask about. Run it as a simple split on the product pages that feature campaign posts, as described in how to A/B test UGC. If the campaign ran a competition element, how to run a UGC competition covers judging and winner announcements, and TikTok-specific collection and rights are in the TikTok creator-to-PDP pipeline.