This Will Ruin Your Brand on Instagram
Every marketer or business owner today faces this necessity to promote their business on social media. One of the best platforms for eCommerce now is Instagram with more than 500 million active users daily. But not every entrepreneur knows how to deal with Instagram, how to make it work for you, and increase your revenues.
As a marketer or business owner, you simply must know what you do, how you do it, and what you want to achieve. Only those brands and businesses make the most out of Instagram who understand the mechanisms of this social media, build their content strategy right, and don’t make the mistakes we will talk about below.
There are a few things that you should avoid doing if you want to grow your business, brand awareness, and sales with Instagram. But what are these things that may ruin the whole strategy and your brand?
Bot comments
Comments consisting of emojis or only one word look like spam. If you use third-party tools to produce such bot comments under your posts, then bad news — this influences the reputation of your brand on social media in a bad way. Real people who follow you see this inauthenticity and fakeness, so the credibility to your account lowers drastically.
If you use third-party tools like Combin for commenting, make an effort and comment as a real person.
By the way, Combin warns you if your comment looks like spam.
Irrelevant Hashtags
Hashtags can get you genuine followers for free, so you definitely should not underestimate their value. But to do so, hashtags should be relevant and reflect your post and business as a whole. To make this work, put hashtags of different density, not only the ones which are currently on pique because no one will notice you in a hashtag feed. And you definitely shouldn’t use the same pack of hashtags under each of your posts.
As for putting hashtags in captions or the comment section, then it doesn’t make a huge difference. Though users and marketers test this, and the reach results are slightly different.
Lack of Analysis
Marketing — whether it’s online or offline — is all about analysis. Instagram marketing is no exception. Though native Instagram statistics are far from perfect, you have to get the most out of it and compare your data.
What metrics should you care about?
Engagement rate. The higher your ER is, the more genuine and relevant audience you have. Basically, ER means that you’re interesting for your followers and they trust you. You can calculate your ER with this formula:
ER= ((likes+comments)/Followers*100%
- Likes is an average likes count per post
- Comments is an average number of comments per post
- Followers is a number of your subscribers
Other metrics are reach, Stories reach, number of followers (only along with other metrics), number of comments, and profile visits.
You can use either native Instagram analytics or use tools like Combin to have a clearer idea of what’s going on in your account. Compare your data, check which posts have a better engagement and reach, and take actions to improve your Instagram marketing.
Wrong Promotion Tools
Simply put, these are third-party tools you use for the promotion that don’t care about your safety at all. Mass commenting, mass liking, follow/unfollow, and other methods work well if you use them wisely. Otherwise, there’s a big chance to get shadowbanned or blocked.
If you want to promote your account with other tools, choose those which have human-like algorithms. Instagram developers are not stupid, and they’re constantly working on improving Instagram algorithms so that it could identify the users who actively use third-party tools with automatic actions.
Irrelevant and Fake Influencers and Bloggers
This topic deserves a full article to write about. Every single blogger on Instagram is now an influencer. But not all of them are valuable for your business. To choose your right blogger for promotion, you need to understand your audience, analyze your competitors, and the blogger you want to cooperate with.
When I say “wrong” I don’t mean fake. The blogger you’ve chosen may really be an influencer, but their audience may not react to your product because they are not your target audience. If you sell kids toys, there’s no sense in collaborating with bloggers whose audience are adults, even if this blogger has a huge amount of followers and a high ER.
Content With No Value
Last but definitely not least. Give your followers something valuable. Some businesses, especially in the B2B sector, should give their followers and potential clients useful information like facts, tips, recommendations, tutorials, make infographics and so on.
You have a chance to show that you’re a leader in your niche with the content you make. That not being said that you should post long captions. Be smart and creative. Make infographics, videos, and Stories. It’s very easy to sell your products and services in such informative captions or videos. Of course, there are businesses where there’s lack of informative or educational content, but you still can show your behind-the-scenes like manufacturing process, Get Ready With… format, your office, colleagues, and anything you can create.