When it comes to social media, Instagram is one of the hottest platforms out there, and with good reasons. 2020 is no easy year. With digital disruptors everywhere, the competition is just getting bigger. Here a few mistakes that you should avoid while marketing your Instagram profile in 2020. You can thank us later.
1. Using Stock Images
Stock and Royalty Free images particularly are easy things for lifestyle influencers to use to try to grow faster to get more Instagram followers. While it sounds good at first, but in reality, it doesn’t really give an impression of an authentic Instagram Profile.
You can try growing your Instagram account on the basis of your real life, even if you do apply Instagram filters. Stock photography for Instagram is rarely any kind of indication of what life is really like.
And as a business, stock photography does have its place on your website and in print materials, but not on Instagram. Your audience values authenticity, which you won’t find in stock photography – especially if you are one of the thousands of brands using it.
All of us have a smartphone at this time and age. Using it to take photographs in high resolution and free of cost for social media seems like a better option. Taking your own photos with a mobile device will definitely be cheaper and more effective than investing in stock photography anyway.
2. Avoiding a strict posting schedule
Posting on a consistent schedule builds trust with your audience. When your followers are engaged, they know when to expect new content from you. Many will look for it beyond what shows up in their feed.
Even if it’s just one post a day, whatever you start with, stick with it. Don’t start with three a day, go to one a day, then take a week off, then spam everyone’s feeds with six or more posts. If you do this, you’ll see a decline in your following, more than likely after the spam posts you do to conclude your extended hiatus. Insta Captain is the perfect tool to schedule your posts. This Instagram Bot is undetectable by Instagram and that makes it even better.
If you need some guidance on the best times to post, take a look at your Instagram Analytics to see when the majority of your engagement takes place. Then, post your content around that time so you know your followers are likely online and ready to engage with it.
You can use a social media planning tool just like InstaCaptain to not only map out your content ahead of time, but even to schedule it to post so that you’re never left wondering what to post and when, or caught without content ready to go.
InstaCaptains comes with many cool features which enable its users to almost automate their Instagram accounts for tasks from scheduling content to post to following and unfollowing people. Take up the 3 days free trial of Insta Captain and see for yourself. You can auto dm, auto follow, auto like, and do so much more.
3. Not following your followers back
When people decide to follow you, make sure you follow them back at least. You do not have to comment or interact with them on their personal account, but taking the time to follow them gives you the chance to get to know them better so you can find out what interests them. You can use the information to get their attention and better meet their needs.
You can also automate the task of following and unfollowing Instagram users by using the InstaCaptain Instagram tool. With the help of auto-follow, you can search for Instagram users in your niche and Insta Captain will help you to follow them automatically to get their attention.
Furthermore, you can search for quality images related to your niche on Instagram and automatically like them.
Search the images using hashtags and places put the status to active, click save and you are ready to go.
4. Not paying attention to your Instagram captions
Even though Instagram is a predominantly visual platform, that doesn’t mean you can completely ignore your photo captions. They should be well written and should tell a story about the image you’re sharing.
They should include a call to action and persuade your followers to connect with you – even if it’s as simple as liking or commenting.
If you don’t take the time to proofread, you could have a profile riddled with errors, which harms your credibility with your audience.
5. Not responding to the actions of your followers
Without engagement, you’ve got nothing. You can have millions of followers, but if they aren’t liking, and sharing your stuff, commenting, then they aren’t paying attention to what you have to say. You must take the time to engage with them, encouraging them to like and comment, then taking the time to thank them for their effort.
That’s how you build connections, and that’s how those connections eventually become customers. If people are asking questions, take the time to answer them. If people notice their comments are falling on deaf ears, they’ll just stop engaging you. Insta captain has options to auto follow, auto like, auto comment. With the help of the auto comment feature, InstaCaptain comments automatically on an Instagram post without you having to do it manually. You can write up a comment you want to post and then target the places you want your comment to be.
You can target accounts by using hashtags, places or you can directly target the audience of influencers in your niche with the help of our filtering features.
However, you should definitely take some time out to personally respond to your followers.
6. Using popular hashtags
The more popular a hashtag is, the more people will search for it, and the more people will see your content, and the more followers you’ll get, right? Wrong.
The more popular a hashtag is, the more posts it gets, meaning your photo will only be visible for a few seconds before it’s pushed out the way to make room for new content that uses it. Plus, the hashtags should be relevant to your post and not just about anything.
Take time to keep your hashtags different and relevant, because if you’re using the same ones over and over with each post, you’re never exposing your content to new audiences. Relevant hashtags keep you in the recent posts section for longer, increasing the chances you’ll reach an actually targeted audience. Insta Captain lets you put hashtags in the filter and look out for accounts that follow those hashtags or even use such hashtags.
It builds credibility.
To sum it all up
Avoiding these mistakes will get you really far in the Insta game.
By taking the time to create your own quality content, engaging with your audience, following them to learn more about them, researching hashtags that are relevant to your product and audience, showing you appreciate them following you, and posting consistently, you will be on your way to Instagram domination.
