5 reasons why brands reject your submissions

We’ve all been in the scenario where we put in SO much effort for a submission but only to end up getting a rejection email from the brand. It sucks, we know.

So we decided to go behind the scenes with our operations team and get insights as to the top 5 reasons why brands would reject your submissions.

1. Not following the brief

To start things off, the top reason from brands for rejecting submissions is when Partiposters DO NOT follow the campaign brief.

It is always the small things that get missed out or forgotten such as unique receipts or specific tags in the caption.

The biggest no-no mentioned by the brands is when people use the same receipt for multiple submissions. No matter how good your picture is, it would be an immediate rejection from them.

So avoid getting rejected by taking time to read our briefs carefully and making sure that you do ALL the necessary steps stated so you don’t have to waste time and effort resubmitting! Plus, submissions are shown in chronological order. If you have to resubmit, you’ll also lose your original spot! 😩

2) Fake Engagements

One of the main reasons why brands are choosing to work with nano/micro-influencers (aka our Partiposters) is due to the higher engagement %, with macro influencers, their engagement % is usually significantly lower.

This is why brands take engagement very seriously as they want to ensure that you are helping them reach their target audiences.

Brands do vet through your profiles too and they will also look at profiles that engage with your posts. Therefore in the case where your engagements are not genuine or filled with highly suspicious accounts, your account will most likely get flagged.

Another thing that was highlighted to us is hashtags! Brands tend to avoid/de-prioritize submissions that contain a lot of hashtags. As much as you’d like to get more likes and comments, they are usually from overseas accounts and they are not genuine followers of yours.

A tip from us would be, go and engage with your current followers so that they will see your posts more often! Try not to use too many hashtags especially irrelevant ones that will get you fake engagements. And of course, please DO NOT use things like ‘like generators’ or buy things like engagements and comments.

Yes, it is super cheap to buy and it’ll help you get nice big numbers aesthetically but these are not genuine and will do your account more harm than good. Again, brands do vet through the profiles/posts and these are the things that will get your account flagged.

3) Fake Followers

Another taboo topic, fake followers! With buying likes and followers so easily available nowadays, we understand it is hard to not be tempted to try. But just like how Eve shouldn’t have taken a bite of the forbidden apple, buying followers or likes is a forbidden fruit from brands.

As we mentioned above, brands do look through your profile, including who follows you and engages with your posts. They will look out for suspicious profiles, overseas profiles, profiles with no profile pictures and those without followers/posts, just to name a few.

There are also times where you’ll encounter random suspicious accounts following you. So do yourself a favour and purge every once in a while. They might increase your overall follower count but they’ll actually have an impact on your engagement rate as they are most likely not going to be engaging with your posts. Basically buying of fake followers devalues your account instead of giving your more opportunities.

4) Photo Submitted Does Not Match Your Feed

Be daring and try something out of your comfort zone! Brands are always on the lookout for creative content that are in line with their brief. This is especially useful if your feed does not have a specific look yet so you can experiment and see which type and style of content works best for you. This will also help shape your profile type as you figure out the content that your followers like to see.

If you need ideas, try the 30-day photography challenge! You can easily find them online and it’ll help challenge you to get out of your comfort zone to try new things! Who knows, you might end up discovering your niche!

As an avid partiposter, you'd have realised by now that brands will always state the type of profiles they are looking for to take part in their campaigns. It can range from lifestyle profiles to fitness profiles to foodie profiles. This is something the brand considers when vetting through submissions too. So do ensure that you fulfil ALL the campaign requirements before joining the campaign if not you might risk getting your submission rejected!

5) Best submission gets approved first

'I submitted before my friend but why did my she/he get approved first’ is probably one of the most common questions we get. How brands see your submission is via our campaign manager which shows all pending submissions in rows and in chronological order.

Brands usually look through all the submissions at the point in time before approving but because of that, your submission might get lost in the midst of the others, especially the ones that might be more curated and/or visually looked like more thought and effort went into creating the content.

It doesn’t mean that the fastest submission will get approved first. Brands will approve submissions that are of good quality, matches the brief and best represent their brand image and values.

Of course, don’t take too long to submit your content as there’s also a budget limitation. Once the budget is up, brands will stop approving.

TIP: Check out our blog post on how to make your pictures insta-worthy