10 Things Instagram Hates About You
Social media is a big part of our lives, and quite frankly it’s been thrust upon our worlds with little or no instruction. The rules have been developed, as the medium evolved. However, as in any relationship — family, friendships, relationships; social media is about fostering and nurturing relationships that you cultivate on the platform.
Therefore it should come as no surprise that there are boundaries, and etiquettes to be followed. Just the way you don’t like an unpleasant friend and prefer to walk away from toxic relationships, the same applies to social media. No one enjoys a rude brand, blogger or account. You’ll be unfollowed or blocked in an instant.
If you are trying to grow your community and establish your credibility on social media, you want to avoid making the following mistakes.
1. DON’T BUY LIKES & FOLLOWERS ❤️🚫
No one likes a deceptive person. In the social media universe, buying likes and followers is equivalent of fraud. Instagram is a platform, where authentic connections are your real currency.
Buying likes and followers will not get you that engagement and will do more harm to your brand than good. As an influencer, you will discredit your own value, if you cannot organically connect and engage with your audience.
Infact, Instagram takes the fraudulent activity seriously, and has taken steps to reduce inauthenticity, by removing artificial likes, comments and accounts.
In order to grow your community, interact with your audience, listen to them, understand their needs, focus the core of your content on your community’s interests.
Example: WeWork has built an international community across the globe through its social media efforts that goes beyond the product, and focuses on the brand’s values and it’s community. They promote collaboration, creativity, and compassion amongst their community.
Takeaway: Below are a few ways to organically engage on the platform
Share compelling content.
Build engagement by responding to audience comments.
Run contests.
Use relevant hashtags.
Engage through Instagram Stories and Live.
Write engaging captions
2. DON’T POST SPORADICALLY OR BE INCONSISTENT 📆🚫
Once you have a content strategy in place and know your brand messaging and tone inside out, the next step is scheduling — the backbone of creating content for your audience. Know your goal, know your audience, and create relevant, entertaining content.
The two golden rules are — Be Consistent & Be Authentic!
Have an editorial calendar in place to ensure that you post regularly — not too little, not too much, and not too sporadically. This also helps you plan your creative assets and leaves room to include a diverse range of content like stories, posts, contests, how-to demonstration videos, and behind-the-scenes content.
There is also such a thing as too much content. Know your audience and know that they have short attention spans. For example, you cannot have a fifty post long story. They’ll just swipe and skip it. It should just be brief, pithy, and engaging.
Example, Hello Fresh keep their communication on IG Stories — brief, interactive, and to the point.
On the flip-side, you cannot have too little or sparing content either. You cannot make your posts ambiguous or have them pop up once a week. They should have the minimum information crafted in the most succinct way. Example, Vogue magazine shares brief prompts or highlight the most interesting information about an article to encourage their audience to Swipe Up and read more.
Takeaway:
In order to achieve the sweet spot, experiment with different timings to post, the number of posts, and length of posts to see what your audience is most receptive to, and stick with it. Make Instagram Analytics your BFF.
Remember each piece of content that you put out there should add value to your audience.
3. DON’T USE CONTENT NOT NATIVE TO THE PLATFORM 🚫
Social media is not like any conventional form of media, which is why you need to use “tools” native to the platform. If you want to promote your content and grow organically, you need to blend into the platform. Definitely stand out in terms of the content you create by all means, but do so using existing tools.
Example, all the good brands make use of the Instagram fonts, colour palette, interactive tools and stickers available to them.
Below is an example of a story by New York Times that makes use of the native fonts and Type format on IG.
Takeaway:
Don’t always posts landscape photographs on Instagram. It’s a vertical friendly platform.
Try and use Instagram’s native fonts in the most creative way.
Don’t use heavily photoshopped and glammed up images on Instagram. Instagram users enjoy non-fussy content, so keep it casual.
Keep the video lengths to a minimum. Nobody wants to watch a whole saga!
4. DON’T USE THE SAME CONTENT ACROSS ALL SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 🔗🚫
You CANNOT simply cut, copy, paste the same content across all social media platforms — because they work differently, and have different audiences with different expectations.
Customization is the name of the game, and content should be tailor-made for each specific soial platform. Therefore quality over quantity needs to be emphasized here.
To make this clearer, below are a few examples:
- Hashtags work better on Instagram than Facebook.
- Formal content works better on LinkedIn than Instagram.
- Blog Posts work better on Linkedin. Video works better on Snapchat.
- Landscape images work on Facebook. Square and Vertical imagery works on Instagram and Pinterest.
Example — Below is Buzzfeed and the various types of content they post across Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram
It’s more formal and polished on Linkedin 🤵
It’s more informative on Facebook 🤓
It’s casual on Instagram 🤙
Takeaway:
You must customize a piece of content for each platform. You could run a 2-minute long video on Facebook, but you might want to edit it into 15-second bite-sized videos for Instagram.
5. DON’T DISPLAY SLOPPY GRAMMAR & SPELLINGS ✍️🚫
Imagine this — you labour to come up with a kickass content strategy, you design perfect creative assets, and you write the funniest captions, but you forget to proofread it. What your audience takes away is that you’re sloppy, and one grammatical error or spelling mistake or a poorly constructed caption is all it takes to ruin your first impression.
Takeaway:
Don’t “Blowdrie” your grammar! While proofreading is not too much of a fun process — always double, triple-check your captions, and Spell check. Spell check. Spell check.
6. DON’T IGNORE YOUR AUDIENCE 👨👩👧👦🚫
Not only is it very demanding to create original content everyday, it’s also a more solitary experience just posting one’s own content. In order to grow your community, curate content from accounts that you find inspirational and relevant, also re-post user generated content.
Example, Starbucks always regrams their community’s content, and it’s a great way of showing the brand’s appreciation for its audience.
Takeaway:
Be inclusive. Make User-Generated Content a part of your strategy. It not only helps you fill up your content calendar, it also enables high engagement with your community.
7. DON’T BE CLUELESS ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE 🤔🚫
This is crucial. You cannot please everyone, thus everyone is not your audience. Also, in order to craft content for a specific audience, you need to know who you are addressing. Defining your audience gives you a solid springboard to focus your content.
Your core audience is also who you want to engage with, and get feedback from. It gives you the opportunity to listen to them, understand their needs, which would be beneficial for any brand!
Madewell knows its audience well — the clothes they like, the food they enjoy, and the books they like to read. They listen, appreciate, and share what they think might interest their audience.
Takeaway:
Know your audience, and know your goal. Without that, you are just a blind man in a sea of content, and honestly that’s a waste of your time and effort.
8. DON’T BE A DINOSAUR 🦖🚫
You don’t want to be known as the fuzzy-duddy brand on Instagram. Other than that, it’s a platform that allows brands to experiment! Take the risk, and try new features. Be bold and experiment with Stories, Instagram Live, any new features like Question Sticker that they launch. Your audience wants you to be a relevant brand.
Urban Outfitters experiments with many Instagram tools, like the Question Sticker in this example.
9. DON’T BE A LONER 🚶🚫
This is customer care 5.0. You need to be on your feet when it comes to thinking, engaging, and being creative with your audience.
- Respond to questions
- Thank your audience from time to time
- Offer them prompt advice
- Tag them if you are using their content
- Don’t be negative. Ever.
- Go out of your way and address their concerns and interests
Example: Target came up with a list of things people could do on holidays and posted it on the Stories.
Takeaway:
Show your audience and your community that they are noticed, and that you care for them!
10. DON’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY 🤷🏻🚫
Have fun!You’re on a platform that is fun, light, casual, and entertaining. If there is one place that your light side can shine, this is it! So embrace that avatar, and have fun with your content, your brand, and your audience!!
Example, Warby Parker always makes it’s messaging colourful, bold, and fun!
Takeaway:
Be yourself and keep it casual!
If you have any further pointers on things to avoid on social media, or any further etiquettes to share, please mention them in the comments below!
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