Halloween is a huge holiday in the Yellowstone universe. Since 2019, fans have been submitting their Yellowstone-themed costumes for a chance to be featured on the Yellowstone Instagram page. In previous years, this has been a manual process via submissions through our Instagram DMs. For 2023, we created a custom microsite so everyone could upload their images and vote for their favorite. We used those votes to curate this year’s selects, highlighting the top looks on our Instagram Stories.
This dynamic microsite was created to house Yellowstone-themed Halloween costumes. We wanted to make sure the upload process was simple, to lower the barrier of entry for participation. We also built in an approval process on the backend of the site to weed out duplicate entries and ensure only appropriate content was uploaded. Once live, we promoted the microsite across our social handles, and then in the weeks following Halloween, we used the fan votes to determine which images to share across Instagram. But the site meant that all of the uploads were visible and sharable for more fan engagement.
We were super pleased with the results of our site. From a bandwidth perspective, creating this site allowed us to remove some of the manual work previous years had experienced. As a result, more people were able to participate and show off their Yellowstone fandom. We received more than 800 entries, and so many people were able to showcase their images. And then, we used those fan votes to determine which images to share to our Instagram, so it allowed for more fan participation and engagement from previous years.
