12 Classic Mistakes Brands Make On Instagram

Instagram is viewed as a bit of a savior for brands that struggle in the world of social media marketing. It can bring great results if you have a good strategy that you implement intelligently. However, if you drop your guard and try to cut a corner or two, you’re looking disaster squarely in the face.

It’s perhaps best to not look disaster squarely in the face. Try out some ideas that can help you get to a great place on the platform. Every brand (to an extent) can get something out of Instagram.

Making just one of the following mistakes could well prove to be the spanner in your proverbial works. Our advice? Do the opposite of what follows in the list below.

Read, and take notes.

Yes, this is still a thing. Brands are chasing this particular dream like it’s the 90s all over again, and the Web can be played. It can’t be. Instagram itself is cracking down on accounts that are spammy, and ‘bought’.

If you think it’s right to buy followers for your Instagram account, go ahead. Knock yourself out. The result is that you will have thousands of people following you who will never engage with you. These followers are way outside your own customer profile.

The best piece of advice we enjoy here is to avoid this practice like the plague. It’s unhealthy for your brand and can even get you banned from Instagram. That kind of hurts if you have invested large sums of money in getting it all set up and moving forward with content.

You see, content should be your strategy, not buying followers.

Great content that is compelling and useful to your audience will win out over time. This really happens. It grows from strength to strength as your content becomes solid and meaningful. You don’t get solid and meaningful with 10,000 followers suddenly appearing on your account.

Being way over the top on the sales technique will win you no friends. This is especially true on Instagram. It still has this kind of sophisticated feel to it. It seems almost sullied with promotional stuff (when it happens). It’s not Twitter yet, and you need to back off that salesy stuff when you feel the urge to indulge in it.

Think about how you can solve the problems your audience has. Make this approach the focus of your work on Instagram. People genuinely want to be helped. They will more likely follow an account that helps than one that tries too hard to sell.

Think about it. How could you help your customers with your content? How could you make it solve a problem you know that they have? Get these questions right and you’re being truly valuable as a resource. You will gain followers this way.

You’re not selling a car. And even if you are, there are better ways to do it on Instagram.

UGC is user-generated content. Fancy acronyms aside, it’s the best way to pull in engagement. Brands that make a real effort to encourage UGC are onto a winner. The silliest thing about this is the fact that UGC can actually be done through the easiest of ways.

The humble comment is UGC. It’s a situation where a member of your audience feels compelled to engage with you. This is content that they create, not you. This is fantastic stuff. As comments increase and people get comfortable, they can come up with good stuff.

Take that up a notch and you can start to think about running contests that ask customers to send in their own photos. This means that you are creating an Instagram feed with a little help there too. It’s priceless really.

Run a contest that asks the audience to help with the theme of the upcoming month on your feed. Try it. You may be pleasantly surprised. It’s the audience getting involved with your brand. And that is powerful.

If you ignore UGC you are making a pretty terrible mistake. One that could easily slow down any growth you are planning to have. There’s nothing better than a conversation, so you should be encouraging that as often as you can.

This is possible. Brands do it. Let’s look at how they get it wrong.

The most obvious mistake with hashtags is thinking they work best all the time and in large numbers. This is a classic mistake because brands see others doing it to death. They start to think that it’s perfectly acceptable to have a little set of crossed lines all over their feed.

It simply isn’t. Get that one out of your stream as soon as you possibly can. It isn’t about ten hashtags being used a lot, but instead being used well. There is a huge difference.

One good way to use hashtags is to use them as a way of getting noticed. You can latch onto some hashtags and just get them out there so that people start to notice you. Doing this to death will make you seem desperate.

A post that is relevant and contextual and has a hashtag that is highly popular in it will get exposure.

Making it so that your audience has nothing to look at is a death-blow. If you’re going to invest time and money on Instagram, then do it properly. Ensure that you spend enough time on the posting. You should post at least once a day for starters, more if you want to build engagement quickly.

The mistake is to not post at all, or to post so erratically that people think you’re just not committed. Let’s make one thing clear. The Instagram community is loyal to the platform. Not invested in posting content regularly? You’ll be seen as a part-time proposition. And that doesn’t make money.

We recommend going for two posts a day to start with, and seeing what that does to your engagement. You may need to switch it up, but stick with two a day for a little while to get into the routine of things.

We thoroughly warn against leaving it for days on end. People will just start to get a little sick of the situation, and basically stop taking you seriously. That is a nightmare situation to be in. There is nothing worse than a content wasteland. It just means you don’t care about the audience. You are simply trying to pop up on the platform in the hope that you’ll receive traffic and engagement.

Prove the doubters wrong. If you’re going to use the platform, use it fully and in a consistent way. Otherwise you may as well not bother being on the platform, you won’t gain anything.

Okay, we know that some stock photos are actually of a high quality, and they can look really nice. But you can’t do that kind of thing for too long. It starts to look just a bit spammy after a while. Your customers are looking for content that is wholly original, not stock.

Think you’ve just found the most amazing photo ever? It will do you no favours if it’s stock and every person on the planet can have access to it.

You need original photos that set you apart from everyone else. This gives you uniqueness. The worst thing you can do in this regard is to find some of the photos on Google that everyone and their dog has used. It’s not pretty.

Just like you shouldn’t try to post one day a week (it doesn’t work), try to avoid over posting. This smacks of creepy desperation, and just shows that you feel you need to make friends as a brand.

It isn’t good. If you find yourself posting more than five times a day, it could well be an issue for you. And if you remember that posting original photos is really the only way to go, five times a day is hard work.

This is one of the key aspects of poor brand performance on Instagram. A company decides that it’s going to take some product shots. It then spends its time creating boring images of the product on a plain colour background.

While this may work for Apple (perhaps) it doesn’t cut it with regular brands. You need to think a little more creatively with your photo content to get engagement.

This is a real problem for some brands, and it’s all about the bio. The bio that Instagram gives you for your use is important. It tells people who you are and why they should buy from you. Your credibility comes across in your bio. Getting this part right means that you have an instant selling tool. That should help massively with your branding.

Make sure your Instagram bio pushes out the boat a little. You can mention your mission and the ways in which you can help your customers. Don’t just make it about yourself. Be in a place where your bio is compelling rather than a carbon copy of every other bio out there.

Really easy to do. It means that you’re missing out on some key information that could change your outcome. Take a look at your metrics and make sure at they are finely tuned when it comes to reporting. You need to know about your audience and what they engage with.

Metrics can be easily accessed and used. If you’re completely ignoring them, you’re working blind.

Let’s say you sell a product and you are just choosing to upload photos of the product every day. Ostensibly there is nothing wrong with that. You can’t pretend you are selling anything else, right? It’s going to look pretty boring if all you end up doing is posting the same product photo with a different angle.

You have to mix it up. You could be facing a situation where everyone thinks you either can’t take photos or you have the world’s most boring product.

Fight this. Take your photos in different lights, from a multitude of different angles. Take your photos with models using the product when you can. Or have a little fun with it and take the photos in unusual places. Do anything, in fact, to make your photo work different.

It’s possible to create too much content. This long-winded copy will simply distract and bore your potential customers. When you’re writing anything on Instagram, keep it as short and sweet as possible. People will simply lose interest if you’re too boring and you will lose them as customers.

The rule of thumb here is simple. Ensure that your message on Instagram is focused on the imagery that you use. The content as in written content, well that comes second.