Instagram is the breakthrough marketing platform for your business, until it is used incorrectly. Learn here the common Instagram marketing mistakes you must avoid.
With over 400 million active users and 55 million photos sharing daily, Instagram is an effective marketing strategy for any business. With the social media engagements, you can actually boost up your business growth.
The powerful visual content medium ensures high visibility, brand awareness, conversion rate, and a bonding with your target audience.
But sharing pictures or videos with your followers can’t work because of some rookie mistakes limiting your brand exposure on Instagram. From photos to the account settings, here is the list of common mistakes killing your Instagram marketing campaign.
#1 Using Low-Quality Photos
Images can make or mar the visual appeal! As a business profile, you can’t afford to upload silly looking or blur pictures on Instagram account, especially of your new product launch. The poor quality images can send a negative impression about your products to the audience. Therefore, be professional on that front as possible. Use high-quality photos and upload them with correct size by avoiding odd cut outs.
In short, quality of visuals should be your top priority on your Instagram account!
#2 Sounding Too Promotional
Yeah, Instagram is part of your promotional strategy, but it doesn’t mean you go overboard with that. If you do that, you’re serving lazy, boring and out and out a selfish content which can even turn off your target audience. It’s like you blow your own trumpet without giving a damn about your followers.
Try to balance the promotional stance of the content by keeping it tasteful, thought provoking, entertaining and compelling as well. For example, you can upload a photo of your product in a way to make the viewer guess about it.
#3 Not Posting Regularly
The benefits of consistent posting on Instagram for your business are:
- It shows you are dedicated to your audience.
- Keeping people interested in you
- Increasing your brand awareness
And you lose all these benefits once you get laid back about your posting frequency. According to a recent study, many big brands upload their content nearly 1.5 times per day. The study also found brands that are not into a strict posting schedule are at the risk of losing the followers.
Make sure you’re posting relevant and appealing content instead of a plethora of images on your follower’s feeds. It is an exhaustive task to produce quality content to schedule daily, but it will reward in the long run!
#4 Not Using Hashtags Properly
Hashtags are used to give maximum exposure to your posts so that they can reach to the potential followers. But using too many hashtags in a sentence will make it only unreadable to the audience, besides making it a spam. Likewise, using very few or no hashtags limit your post exposure. The optimal solution is that you can use too many hashtags in your comments instead of overloading your caption with them. But don’t publish any post without hashtags.
- Don’t try long hashtags like #NewYorkSteetLover as they only aim at a very specific audience.
- Don’t use offbeat hashtags with special characters like #WhoCront!!!! if you want people to search you naturally.
- Don’t hashtag everything.
- Keep your hashtags relevant and easily searchable.
#5 Posting on Wrong Time
Ever wonder why your post doesn’t get a lot of engagement even though you take care of all above? The reason may be scheduling it at the wrong time when your audience is not active or they don’t have time. So, choosing the right time slot makes a big difference.
For example, evening (around 5.00 p.m.-7.00 p.m.) is the best time to release your post when people are supposed to back from work/school and have time to check their phone.
#6 Your Content is Not Engaging
Why they follow you when you have nothing gripping? So, it’s a nice and wise idea to keep your content “customer centric.”
For that, you need to come up with the interesting photos with a call to action words or killer one liner. Here are some examples:
- Use a variety of different images, from your products to quotes to behind the scenes photos to make your content appealing.
- Upload one of your follower’s photos in which they are using your products.
- Animal photos are extremely popular and you can capitalize on that.
- You can depict the role of your employee, and show owner having fun with the team.
- Use of emotions is the best way to make your content compelling. For example, posting a photo of an employee on his last day will be nostalgic feeling.
#7 Not Responding to Comments
Posting nice content is not enough to keep the followers loyal towards your account. They can be pissed off or feel “isolated” on not getting your response to their queries. As reporting is not an easy thing on Instagram, and one needs a third party app for that, thereby commenting is the best way to show love to your fans or customers. True, it’s seriously hectic to reply each query or comment, but at least you can sort out the important one or respond to the comments when they are few. Remember, customers find themselves close to the business which listens to them. At least, saying thanks or nice, cost nothing!
#8 Making Your Instagram Account Private
“I am posting on right time. I am responding to my user’s comment. My content and photos are nice. Then, why I am not getting followers?”
If you’re one of those guys asking this question, then you better check your account settings. Maybe you set your business account on personal mode. And keeping it in the personal mode means you’re limiting your opportunity to find unexplored markets and can’t connect with your customers properly. Setting your images and videos to private is good for personal accounts, but it won’t work for company accounts which are meant for marketing. A quick fix for that: switch it to the public.
Avoiding these mistakes from your Instagram account help your business gains a competitive edge. Besides, you create a beneficial community both for your brand and the followers. Keep in mind even a small loophole can make you lose your followers to other competitors.
Author Bio: Varun Sharma is a Co-Founder at KVR WebTech Pvt. Ltd., one of the fastest growing SEO Company in Chandigarh, India. He analyzes Digital Marketing strategies, trends and practices emphasizing on Mobile, SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. You can follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
