Marketers often ramble on about how to use Instagram to grow their business.
Instagram is still one of the most popular platforms for marketing. Instagram statistics show that more than 25,000,000 businesses use Instagram to market their products and services.
Instagram’s visual nature allows anyone to be creative in branding their product.
It’s still difficult for new brands to see past common mistakes and be a success on the platform.
Fret not!
This article is designed to help you avoid the errors made by beginners when marketing products or brands on Instagram. These tips will help you to be a master at branding your product on Instagram.
1. Using Incomplete Bio
It is only half of the job to create a great bio for your brand or business. New brands often neglect to create a relevant and professional bio for their Instagram account.
How can you avoid it?
First, do not make your bio too long. We recommend that you don’t post too much information about your brand or product. Keep it simple.
People won’t stay long enough to read the entire history of your company. It is important to keep your information concise and relevant if you want people to connect with you.
Use the second space for posting a link to your product page. If they are interested, they will be redirected to your product page where they can describe the product.
Shoppers don’t want to be overwhelmed with text and media at once. To make it easier for your customers to read, you might consider adding emojis or line spacing. You can get lots of people to view your product if you are careful with your information.
2. Do not respond to your followers
Your business will grow if you respond to your followers. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of damaging your brand’s image.
If someone leaves feedback about your brand or product, it is important to take the time and respond. Even if it is a suggestion, you should respond modestly.
Any customer or follower might need assistance with your brand or product. They should receive genuine customer service. Sometimes it is necessary to address a personal concern by giving the option to email you to resolve the problem.
It’s a great way for your brand to add value by building relationships with followers and responding via message exchange. Your followers will notice that you care about them and are interested in their engagement.
3. Uploading random or poor quality images
Instagram is all about images. Your brand’s image quality speaks volumes about you. Images that are not professional in quality or are too small look unprofessional and nobody wants to see them.
You should also be careful with the quality of your images. Imagine posting images of your product or brand that are not in line with the Instagram image size guidelines. Your followers might lose interest in your brand and stop following you.
You may have to take many beautiful photos of the same subject, and then adjust their aspect ratios.
SocialPilot allows you to post from your profile without worrying about dimension issues or auto-cropped images. An error message will appear on your Instagram account if you upload an image with incorrect dimensions.
Next comes the best part!
SocialPilot’s built-in image editor allows you to adjust your image dimensions without having to use an external editor.
To crop Instagram photos in the right ratio, you can either use a 4 to 5 or 1 ratio. You can crop your Instagram image in a 16 to 9 story aspect ratio if it is intended for a story.
You can also use many of its features to quickly improve your image quality, aside from the pre-defined ratios for social media.
You should not accept the first picture you take and then forget about it. Do not be satisfied with the first photo you take. You can use some image editing tools such as PicMonkey or Pixlr to enhance your photos. Instagram filters are also available. You can use them to enhance and edit your images to show the best possible representation of your product.
4. Not Using Hashtags Properly
Hashtags are crucial in helping your posts be discovered on Instagram. However, you should be aware that hashtags can cause problems and may not show up in the results.
Hashtags must be short and relevant for everyone. Follow popular hashtags that are relevant to your niche. This will allow you to attract the right people’s attention to your business.
Insta users use popular hashtags to find new things. Your profile will be seen by more people if you include relevant hashtags in your posts. There is a direct correlation in engagement and the number of hashtags you use per post.
But, you shouldn’t use too many hashtags.
Instagram allows you to use a maximum 30 hashtags per post. You don’t have to use hashtags excessively to get the desired number. You can get a great engagement by using 3-5 Instagram hashtags.
Take a look at how concise and on-point Swarvoski’s hashtags can be.
5. Repetitive or boring content
Instagram is one the most creative platforms. Instagram has so many features that you can create amazing content that boring is impossible.
Your content should be inspirational. It is not a good idea to bombard your followers with repetitive images and content every day.
Engaging content is essential to maintain your audience’s interest. Otherwise, your followers will become bored. This will cause you to lose your audience to other people who create more interesting and valuable content.
6. Over- or under-posting
You might be a skilled user of Instagram and know that it is not a good idea to post on Instagram too often!
Your constant Instagram posting will frustrate your followers. Your followers will get annoyed if you don’t post enough.
What should you do?
This is the key to creating a balanced Instagram management strategy. It is important to decide when posts should go live. Timing is everything.
Your posts should be created at a time that your audience can easily set their watches. You help to set expectations for how your brand will behave.
It is best to decide when you are most likely to post to Instagram. Yes! Yes!
Once you have decided the best times to publish your content at, use a social media scheduling tool.
SocialPilot, for instance, allows you to schedule posts to Instagram in advance so that you can easily review all of your post timing options.
7. Buy Followers
It is not easy to get more followers on Instagram. It’s no surprise that many new Instagram brands end up buying fake followers in an effort to quickly increase their followinger count.
However, buying followers will only give you a large follower count that can be used to attract organic accounts and increase influence. They can also cause more harm if they aren’t careful.
It’s better to grab their attention organically than trying to force them to do so.
Let’s talk in detail about why buying followers could backfire.
We need less engagement
You aren’t getting followers who are interested in you. You’re just buying numbers. You will likely only get fake accounts if you pay for followers/fans and engage in aggressive follower churn.
Loss of integrity and reputation
It can be more difficult to define ethics in today’s world because everyone has a different view. It might be hard for people to see that you have bought followers. People might be suspicious if you suddenly go from 30 likes or followers to 30,000 in two days. It is similar to cheating to buy followers.
8. Set your account to private
If your content is important to your Instagram community, then you should make your account private.
This is similar to building walls between your audience, and your brand. This is the fastest and most common reason for losing followers on Instagram. It has two main reasons:
- If your accounts are set to private, followers must wait for you approval to grant their request. This can take up to an hour. This can make your brand difficult to follow.
- Non-followers cannot see private posts. This can reduce your chances of connecting with potential customers who aren’t following you, but are still interested in your brand.
Your account should be set to public. Go to your privacy settings to change the account setting to open. You will be amazed at how fast your followers increase.
9. Analytical Failure
The worst mistake is to ignore Instagram analytics. You can avoid making the same mistakes as above by tracking your Instagram data.
Nevertheless, many marketers make the error of creating and publishing content incessantly without ever taking the time to analyze their performance.
Instagram is not a place where you can learn what works and what doesn’t.
Instagram analytics gives you a clear picture of your current Instagram marketing strategy. This allows you to identify the best audience and create better content to increase your Instagram growth.
However, it can be difficult to analyze the data from multiple Instagram accounts at once if you have multiple clients.
SocialPilot is a great social media management tool. The analytics feature allows you to see multiple Instagram accounts’ analytics from a single view.
Conclusion
Every social media marketer makes mistakes. But. The problem begins when you don’t learn from your mistakes.
You will make mistakes, but it’s normal. You can improve your mistakes. Recognizing your mistakes is the first step in correcting them.
We’ve covered the most common mistakes that marketers make on Instagram. This article will help you to understand your brand. You can then do all the work and create an Instagram marketing strategy that is unbeatable.
SocialPilot’s first post, 9 Instagram Business Marketing Mistakes to Avoid appeared on SocialPilot.
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