I want to talk about some of the deadly, absolutely deadly mistakes that you might be making on Instagram that you are probably not aware of.
How do I know this?
I was making some of these mistakes myself without even realizing that it was really stunting my growth.
So, if you are finding that you have plateaued on Instagram i.e you’ve reached a certain number of followers on Instagram but you’re finding it really difficult to continue to grow, like you’re doing all the things but it’s not working out for you, then you’re going to want to read this.
I really want to talk specifically about some of the things that a lot of people do not talk about.
The common things that you would have heard are:
“Do not use bots”
“Be patient”
“Be really consistent on Instagram”
“Do not buy followers, likes or anything like that”
“Make sure that you are commenting on other people’s posts”
Those are five things that a lot of people always talk about.
I stand by those and those things are true but I want to share with you seven things that a lot of people don’t actually talk about.
Things that really helped me with my own growth in my business when it comes to using Instagram.
Let’s hit the ground running.
Make sure you are taking copious notes and of course make sure you read until the very end.
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#7: Understand how the platform works?
The 7th thing that a lot of people are not doing on any of the social media platforms is that they do not understand how the platforms even work.
What I mean by that is that social media platforms have micro platforms within them.
What a lot of people are doing is when they think about Instagram they just think about Instagram as a whole.
They’re forgetting that there is of course Instagram, but there’s also:
- Instagram stories
- Instagram highlights
- Instagram feed
- Instagram ads
- IGTV
- Instagram Reels
…all of these areas deserve their own strategy.
People are not strategizing for each of these specific areas and of course, they’re not really following the trend of what is new in terms of using new features.
A lot of people are not jumping on the bandwagon on the new features and one of the reasons why I’m bringing this up is because one thing that I’ve noticed about Instagram and of course Facebook and all of these other platforms is that when they put out a new feature it’s almost like the algorithms have no idea what is going on so they sort of leave the gate wide open.
This means that when you use these new features you are rewarded even more views.
You are rewarded with reach, you are rewarded with followers, you are rewarded with what you want from Social Media which is essentially attention, right?
You are rewarded with people taking calls to action and commenting and all of those things.
So make sure that you really understand how Instagram works in terms of the various micro platforms within Instagram and of course, make sure that you are using its latest feature.
#6: Have a “Game Plan”
A lot of people make a lot of mistakes
They have absolutely no direction when it comes to Instagram.
What that means is that they are just posting whatever it is that they want to post.
One minute they’re posting videos or pictures of themselves doing their makeup the next thing they’re doing is they’re posting something about their food or the next thing they’re doing is posting pictures you know about themselves going shopping.
If you run a business, which is what I’m specifically referring to, then you definitely want to stay away from that.
If you’re just using Instagram for the sake of connecting with your family or your friends and your acquaintances and all of these types of people then that’s totally fine you can do whatever it is that you want on your Instagram
…but if you plan on using Instagram to grow your business it is absolutely important that you have a game plan.
WHAT IS A GAME PLAN?
The first thing you have to consider when it comes to building your strategy for Instagram is what is your niche.
Who is your target audience?
Who is your ideal follower?
These are the types of people that you want to follow because they are the types of people that will take action which is what you want from Social Media.
You want people to move off of Instagram to come on to your email list because that is the only way that you will actually grow in terms of generating sales and generating cash.
Doesn’t it make sense that you work from the end back to the beginning so you know at the end who your ideal client is?
At the end of that road and you go back to the beginning and think:
“Well if this is my ideal client then I need this type of person to be following me on Instagram”
So who is your ideal client?
Once you have discovered who that is then you’ve got to think about what is the ideal type of content that they would like to follow.
What is the ideal type of content that speaks to them?
- Do they respond to videos?
- Do they respond to images?
- Do they respond to Livestreams?
- Do they respond to stories?
- Are they the short attention span type of people?
In which case, you want to do a lot of Stories
Do they love deep thinking and deep long videos?
In which case IGTV is where you ought to hang out.
The only way to know that your content is engaging is of course to make sure that you have a strategy.
The next mistake that I see a lot of people making and this is a double whammy mistake so you might fall into any one of these categories.
#5: Protect your client
Recently we had a situation happen where one of our customers added me on Facebook and I accepted.
The next thing I saw was one of her posts and the moment I saw it I recognized that post.
I thought to myself:
“This is MY post from my Instagram account”
I immediately went into one of our Instagram accounts @thelucrativelady account and it didn’t take long.
I had to do two scrolls and I found the exact post.
What she had done is she had taken the exact post, cropped everything out and had them posted it on a separate platform as her own with her own caption, with her own content without of course crediting me.
The reason I know it’s my post is because it’s our design.
This is our team design.
We know it is our colours.
So one of the biggest mistakes that I see content creators like myself and like you do and that was a mistake that we made as well concerning that specific post is of course that people are not deep watermarking.
Most people are NOT deep watermarking their post.
That means that you’re not crediting yourself.
In this specific instance, we had watermarked the image in the corner but it meant that it was so easy for someone to just crop that off and start to post it as their own and add their own watermark.
So, make sure you are watermarking in the middle of the image.
Make sure that the watermark is in such a place that if somebody is going to snag this post they would literally have to start again which is what we want right?
What I described earlier on is stealing.
That’s very different to borrowing something.
So, make sure that you protect your content.
That’s one of the biggest benefits.
I will take a little bit of time for you to mark your stuff but trust me it does two things:
It protects your content.
This means that if somebody’s going to share it, you are going to be credited to it.
Protect your content in the sense that if somebody’s going to crop out everything that belongs to you in terms of your branding and all of those things that it’s really difficult to craft something that’s bang smack bang in the middle the other is that it grows your brand.
This means that if somebody does share your content so does your watermark get shared as well as it goes along with whatever it is that they have shared.
So when people see it on their own platforms you in fact get credit for that.
So make sure that you are watermarking like crazy.
Now of course I’m not saying put 100 watermarks everywhere but just be strategic about it and make sure that you are watermarking at least the right bank in the middle.
This leads me to number four.
#4: If you do reshare somebody’s post make sure that you give them credit by tagging them
There are two reasons why you want to do this.
#1: Give them credit, to give credit where credit is due because I really believe in reciprocity.
If I’m helping somebody to grow their audience by sharing, guess what they will share?
They will commend you for it.
They will and they will promote you for it.
They will help you along the journey.
It’s all about giving somebody else a hand up.
When you give somebody else a hand up they will give you a hand up as well.
That’s really, really important.
#2: Tag somebody when you share their content.
What it does is that it notifies them.
One of the strategies that smaller accounts use in order to grow is to reshare content from bigger accounts in the hopes that those bigger accounts would also reshare them to their own account thereby exposing them to their own audience which is much bigger.
This is a fantastic strategy except one of the mistakes that people do is they just reshare without tagging.
The problem with doing that is that if you do not tag me I won’t have any idea that you have just reshared my post.
Right?
I see my post being reshared all the time in the proper way, not being stolen but I see it being reshared all the time and sometimes I come across it and I then click and I have a look on and my watermark was there etc so I know that it is my post but these specific people have forgotten to tag me.
This meant that I wasn’t notified that therefore if I hadn’t stumbled across it I would have no idea how to repay them, how to say thank you or how to share some of their stuff to my audience.
If this is a strategy that you are using, make sure that you are tagging whomever you are sharing that post because then that way you get to build a relationship and of course you have a really big opportunity for them to share your stuff with their own audience.
Now we are going into number three.
#3: Always add your stories to your highlights
The third mistake that a lot of people make is actually using their stories so much but not leveraging the highlights.
I see a lot of people using their stories and pouring a copious amount of time into stories on Instagram
Stories are great, stories are really really good because quite a lot of people actually prefer to watch the stories rather than to watch the feeds
…and also because stories have a specific length of time, it can be more engaging and which is I guess why a lot of people do watch the stories.
But where a lot of creators really drop the ball Is because they are not then leveraging the stories into a highlight.
INSTAGRAM STORIES DISAPPEAR AFTER 24 HOURS
So imagine that you spent a couple of minutes, five minutes, ten minutes or whatever creating this specific story you’ve thought about it, you’ve planned it or you’ve caught it on the fly now only the people who see that story within that 24 hours are going to ever see it unless you click on add to highlight.
Once you’ve added it to highlight it means that when new people come to your channel they will see your Highlights.
One of the things that I love about the highlights is that when your highlights are being viewed it goes from highlights to highlights so it just keeps going through and people start to see things posted months back
I mean if you think about my highlights you get to see a lot of things that I have posted from years back.
Now if I had left those stories they would have disappeared into thin air and you would have no idea what Pam was doing two years back unless you scroll through my feed.
Guess what?
Most people won’t do that.
Utilizing your highlight is just another form of creating content and what I love about it is that you’re actually just repurposing the content that you had created in your stories.
So make sure that you always add your stories to your highlights.
This leads me to number two.
#2: Add captions to your stories
What do I mean by that?
Now this is a mistake that I was making as well right now one of the things about stories is that
- Stories are mostly videos.
Yes, you can use images for stories but a lot of people use videos for stories as well.
The thing about videos is that when Instagram shows it when people watch stories the sound is actually off, so they have to actually turn on their sound to hear you speak.
So imagine that you’ve spent all this time speaking and creating all of this content for your stories and people are just viewing them.
Yes, you have that view, you can see that so-and-so has watched your stories and all of that which is all vanity metrics by the way because if they haven’t turned on their sound then they haven’t heard a word of what you said.
They’ve literally just glanced at it and glanced right back off.
One of the things that I do is that I add captions to my stories.
The purpose of the captions is to tell you exactly what the video is about and one of the tips that I recommend for creating your caption is to create it in a way that brings curiosity.
You want to give enough juicy information that someone goes:
“Oh what is she talking about let me turn on my sound and watch this video”
That brings me to my favourite strategy which is one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of people are not doing and this absolutely drives me mad.
#1: NOT DEEP LINKING LINK IN BIO
This specific tip is not just to grow your following, it’s actually to move your followers from Instagram into your email list.
This tip is all about deep linking that link in your bio.
As you all know with Instagram you only get one spot for the link in your bio.
Now what a lot of people do is they just pop that one link in there or they pop a link to just something that doesn’t even help them to grow.
It can be a link to their website or anything like that which by the way is just such a waste of your time to do.
What you want to do instead is make sure that you are deep linking.
Make sure that when somebody clicks that link that it gives them access to several other places that they could visit.
- I use this to promote videos.
- I use this to promote lead magnets.
- I use this to sell people who have bought products.
Yes, just by clicking on this link.
What I also love about the way that I do it is because it gives me a lot of great analytics.
I know instantly exactly what’s working and what my followers.
When I click on it and I look at the analytics I can see that this specific link has generated hundreds of clicks or 20 clicks on this specific one has generated only two clicks in which case I’m going to take out the one that isn’t generating so many clicks and leave the one that’s working hard for me and bringing people onto my email list.
Deep linking essentially is you using anything even if it’s a Linktree, as long as you have access to tracking and analytics you can use it to really, really showcase what it is that you do.
So use it for a variety of reasons, such as:
- Use it to bring people to your webinars.
- Use it to bring people and to schedule a call with you.
- Use it to bring people to watch your youtube videos.
- Use it to bring people to wherever you want to take them.
But please, rookie mistake, avoid sending people to your website, avoid having only one link in that bio.
Just avoid anything like that and avoid using tools that you cannot track and don’t give you analytics.
That’s very important.
Guess what?
What you cannot track you cannot change and what you cannot change you cannot grow.
These are my top tips.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT ON HOW TO USE INSTAGRAM FOR YOUR BUSINESS
INSTAGRAM IS CHANGING | New Instagram Update July 2021 | Algorithm Update
So let me know in the comments below, RE Instagram mistakes…
Comment below and let me know:
Which of these strategies really surprised you?
Which of these mistakes are you making?
I’m really curious to know.
And of course, let me know any questions that you might have about growing your brand on Instagram.
