“I have been on Instagram for several years, and there is still no progress.” “I do everything like bloggers do, but my reach is zero.” And stuff like that… The number of complaints that promotion on Instagram does not convert to profit proportional to the number of followers. To achieve success in promotion on Instagram on your own, it is not enough to follow the recommendations of Instaexperts. It is also important to avoid common mistakes and not be afraid to seek smart and automated assistance.
An outstanding example of such assistance is POSTOPLAN. This is an AI-powered system is designed to fully automate the social media management process. With it, the time for creating, planning, and promoting content will be reduced threefold since the system itself will publish your posts according to a predetermined schedule. As a result, you will not sit for hours with a smartphone in your hands, and the number of subscribers and reach will increase.
What Not To Do: 8 common mistakes when promoting an Instagram account
Buying bots
Any “handbook” of a future PR specialist describes this mistake among the first and major. However, this does not prevent it from remaining the most common. Just remember that the fraud is bound to fail sooner or later. No way.
Instagram can definitely distinguish a bot from a real user, and the sanctions for fraud can be very strong: from a decreased reach and a shadow banning to account deletion. In this case, the “more audience entailed, the higher reach” principle works the other way. Poor audience quality leads to lower reach, which simply kills the future of your channel.
No strategy
It is not the most efficient solution to start a blog just because you want to do this. If you do not develop a promotion strategy, any targeting or advertising from bloggers will not bring you the desired results:
- Segment your audience,
- Develop a content plan,
- Set key tasks and deadlines for their implementation, etc.
This will help you more accurately satisfy the needs and requirements of your target audience. Therefore, your reach level will be the one expected.
Masslooking, massfollowing, and massliking
These three methods are an intermediate step between good and bad promotion methods, which Instagram has been struggling with rather passively for a long time. For the last two years, Instagram began to block massive subscriptions, likes, etc., almost immediately.
As a result, the efficacy of such promotion methods fell by almost 10 times. You can use them as a way to further develop your channel, but at the start, Instagram carefully monitors such activity and can ban an account.
Low-quality content
The logic is simple: if people don’t like what they see on your page, they won’t visit it. Content creation should be comprehensive: competent text, high-quality visuals, and the right publication time.
In addition, Instagram is increasingly moving away from artificiality and demonstration of fake luxury life with all its sparkles, forced smiles, and retouched figures. Naturalness is in trend. Do not download beautiful pictures from Google. Users need real photos. But this does not mean that one should forget about their quality. Live content can also be created through studio filming. The main thing is not to try to deceive your followers, as they are extremely sensitive to what is fake.
The same applied to videos. Nobody says that you need to hire a professional cameraman to create video content. But you should have a basic knowledge of composition, as well as how to shoot and make high-quality video editing. Stories are an exception. They are still a contextual format that anyone can shoot to their liking.
POSTOPLAN allows you to create really high-quality content quickly and easily. It has more than 700 post ideas for every day, a large image library, and a convenient photo editor for creating high-quality visuals. Each user can view in advance how the content they create will look on different platforms.
Sameness
Another common mistake is content sameness. The vast majority of business pages today publish 2–3 types of content, which is fundamentally wrong. After all, different people can have completely different motivations, so you need to interact with the audience from different angles. Some are interested in expert opinion, some buy analytically, and some want to see educational content. Some are looking for social proof, while others need to be ignited emotionally, made laugh, or shocked. Only with the use of different content vectors can you achieve the maximum audience segments.
Lack of engagement
So, let’s imagine another situation. You’ve thought about and defined the strategy, you’re tired from creating interesting and exciting content, but the number of subscribers remains unchanged. It’s because you forgot about engagement. This is exactly the train that pulls your account forward. Users love to be asked for their opinion. That’s why poll posts call to tell, evaluate, and share their opinion in the comments are the “hooks” on which you can attract potential customers. But here, it is important not to stop halfway. The only thing worse than a complete lack of dialogue is a calling for dialogue but then ignoring it.
All posts are selling
No matter how strong your desire to make money is, just remember that Instagram is not a marketplace, although certain elements of it are still there. First of all, people go to Instagram for communication and entertainment, only thereafter for the purchase of goods and services. Calls to buy in every post will only scare off potential customers. Do not kid yourself about their level of interest. A like under your post does not mean that a user will gladly give up money for your product.
Subscribers’ trust is fragile. Even the most beloved blogger who is too carried away with posts like “buy here and now” will be instantly removed from the list of subscriptions. And losing a proportion of subscribers, even a small one, can kill an account. Therefore, it is better not to take any risk and rely on less intrusive sales methods. Publish advertising posts after non-commercial ones and make a logical introduction. Link several previous posts with a product that you will advertise further.
Incomplete toolbox
Today, Instagram has so many different features, and only post creation is beyond the pale. Use sticky and ordinary stories, live broadcasts, and polls. There are a lot of options. You can even publish new stories every hour. According to statistics, users’ interest in this type of content is much higher.
Manual management
Manual subscribing and unsubscribing, as well as posting content by the hour, are a thing of the past. Today there is a range of software that allows you to automate many processes from creating thematic posts to publishing content at a specific time of day.
With POSTOPLAN, everyone can promote their Instagram account. It has many useful features such as scheduling posts for months, automatic posting without your participation, communication with subscribers in the Social Inbox, a high-quality photo editor, and a library of more than 2 million images. The service helps you reduce the time spent on managing social media up to 75%. At the same time, your post and audience reach will grow.
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