One of the fastest growing social media platforms, Instagram has been experiencing incredible growth year over year. Managing marketing strategies and campaigns for Instagram can be tricky because you need to know what content resonates with the audience, what hashtags to use, the optimal timing to post, and other factors that can determine the success or failure of your campaigns. If you are not careful, you can fall into some common traps and start using outdated strategies that can hurt your engagement and diminish your reach.
Have you tried the following strategies on Instagram but not still getting much ROI from them?
2022 is near its end, don’t you think it’s time to re-evaluate your marketing strategies and see what’s still working and who are only a waste of your time and efforts?
Some of them might still be effective but these are 5 strategies that you need to stop doing today:
1. Joining Instagram follower loops for engagement and follower growth
This applies to both product-based businesses and service providers, especially brands creating groups of people to loop in and engage with each other every day.
You may have already heard about this trend and decided to join in for the fun. You’re probably a few weeks in and have seen some pretty impressive engagement happening — a 30% increase in engagement with new people leaving comments on your posts. The only problem is, while it helps as it really boosts your insights and even possibly spikes your social media organic growth because of how the algorithm rewards posts with more discoverability and reach the more engagement you receive, this can also potentially do you more harm than good if you’re not niching down or choosing the right people and groups to engage, especially if most of these accounts are not real people as you think they are, but fake accounts created by only for the follow loop activities.
So, yes! The algorithm (although might take time) eventually detects spam comments from fake or inactive accounts. Moreover, this will also give a negative impression on your real audience and drive away prospect sales.
Now, don’t fret! Here’s what you can do.
Instead of wasting your time and energy joining these engagement pods, focus on building your community by discovering genuine people through relevant hashtags on Instagram, and joining community groups on Facebook that share the same interests and values in your target market.
Never forget our favourite mantra for our clients, “Real people buy from real people”.
Consumers are much more intelligent now than ever before, they can definitely see a genuine community and it’s what they want to join in and get inspired with your UVP.
2. Following/Unfollowing Tactics
If you haven’t heard, Instagram is changing.
Do you remember the days when following a bunch of random people in hopes that they might follow you back and once they do, you unfollow them was cool? We sure don’t.
So it’s time to stop doing it. Here’s why:
- It’s tiresome and let’s be honest, also desperate. There are only so many times we can be like “oh hey, thanks for following me!” before you unfollow them so you can still appear like you have more followers than the number of people you’re following. Isn’t that desperate?
- Genuine connections are what count most! You want people to follow you because they want to follow you, not because you followed them first. A lot of people will follow back if they get enough requests from new accounts—but there are tons of people who won’t do this at all! So trying to trick them into following you by following them first is just going to make things awkward when they realize what happened and then unfollow you (and maybe even block your account).
- They know if you’re doing it for the follow anyway! There are plenty of ways for people to tell whether or not someone followed them first or if their account is full of bots who just want them
- Beats the purpose. You’re following random people every day. So what if they don’t follow you in the end? That’s going to pile up and cost you more time unfollowing again than gain you your desired results.
Instagram is a great place to connect with people who share your interests. But the way other people have been using it for years isn’t working anymore, and this included. Read on to bust more old tactics that no longer work!
3. Leaving generic comments
I know! It’s hard to build a relationship. You don’t have time to find the perfect words and it can be exhausting trying to keep up with all of your followers’ social media needs. I know that sounds like a lot of effort—and it is!
You’re busy and life is short and who has time to write a thoughtful comment when you could just leave a quick “nice post.”
But let me tell you this: If you want to grow a community, start by building relationships first. Remember, these are real people and their posts mean a lot to them. So why not spare them a minute to understand their message and relate to it, then leave a genuine comment? Growing a community isn’t an overnight job, and this can’t be achieved by continuously just leaving comments that sound inauthentic.
4. Using hashtags in your stories
Story hashtags are dead!
And we’re not just talking about the ones that make you want to puke (like #blessed and #liveauthentic). I’m talking about all of them.
The ability to search stories under hashtags is gone (RIP, #snowflake), so if you’ve been hiding your hashtags on stories to increase reach, it’s no longer a thing! You can use it to nurture relationships or serve your current following, but won’t do anything in terms of discoverability on your end.
5. Tagging random pages on your posts
It’s okay to tag pages and people you know, but trying to tag random pages and people who are not yet connected with in hopes of having them follow you or like your post is not going to convince them given that the post is not relevant to them or they don’t share interests with your brand.
While it may seem like a good idea, it’s actually a waste of time. The pages you tag probably don’t care about what you’re posting, and the people that do care about what you’re posting probably won’t see your post because they don’t follow the page you tagged.
When you start tagging random pages and people, it looks like you’re just trying to get more likes or shares without any real interest in building relationships with those accounts.
So what should you do instead? Let’s go back to engagement! Focus on building relationships with people who are interested in what you have to say, and then focus on promoting that content to those people.
WERE YOU OR ARE YOU STILL DOING ANY OF THESE OUTDATED INSTAGRAM STRATEGIES?
Bear this in mind: Just because the old ways worked in the old days, doesn’t mean you should stick with them. Change is the only constant in trying to work with the algorithm and in the entire digital marketing world.
Instagram marketing is one of the best ways to boost sales and get more people engaged with your products. Don’t make the mistake of using super old strategies to grow quickly.
It should be noted that the process of finding and growing a niche Instagram audience is a time-consuming, hit-or-miss endeavour – and all of the tips above are small potatoes when you consider the big picture.
Still, anything that can help you expand your followership is worth considering. After all, a large portion of users on social media sites have found success by way of Instagram, so why wouldn’t you take it seriously? So bookmark this blog for later reference down the road.
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