SIBA’s First Social Media Scavenger Hunt is a Success!

On February 2, SIBA launched our first social media scavenger hunt on Instagram to promote the 2024 Southern Book Prize nominees. 17 SIBA bookstores participated by each posting a photo of a nominated title and tagging another participating store. Readers were  urged to “like” each post and “follow” each store while clicking through all the posts, then to fill out a form indicating they finished the hunt. All finishers will be entered into a drawing to win a $100 gift card to a participating bookstore of their choice, sponsored by SIBA.

Within 3 days of the launch, more than 300 readers completed the scavenger hunt, and more than 200 newly subscribed to The Southern Bookseller Review. All participating stores saw a significant increase in social media engagement, including some who bumped their follower count up by 300+. As of the writing of this article, the minimum amount of “likes” on any one participating post was 334.

Readers’ comments are enthusiastic, with one summing up the general sentiment towards the hunt: “This was so much fun! New books discovered and new bookstores to follow for more books to discover!!”

The scavenger hunt runs through February 13, and the winner will be announced on February 14, at the same time as the Southern Book Prize winners.

SIBA’s two goals with the scavenger hunt were to increase social media engagement for participating stores and subscribers to The Southern Bookseller Review, and both of those goals were met with flying colors.

Lucile Perkins-Wagel, Owner of Blinking Owl Books in Fort Myers, FL, shared, "It was a fun and easy way to bring more traffic to my store’s Instagram page, AND to highlight a really cool SIBA program! I would absolutely participate again, and would specifically like to do more things to highlight the SBR and SBP, as I think those are phenomenal reader resources that could draw so many readers to stores across the SIBA territory!”

SIBA is planning to do more social media scavenger hunts in the future featuring different member stores from around our territory, so make sure you don’t miss out on the next one!

As always, if you have any questions or if you just want to say hello, you can contact me any time at candice@sibaweb.com.