5 Mundane Mistakes Newbie Instagram Influencers Tend to Commit

Instagram influencers have taken the social media world by storm. Be it food, fashion, or design, hundreds of thousands of influencers are flooding the Instagram space like never before.

And with more than 800M users on the platform, influencers have fallen head over heels over it because they can reach so many audiences via a single platform. But there are certain don’ts that influencers need to bear in mind before they start collaborating with brands.

Here is our list of common mistakes that newbie influencers tend to commit.

Mistake #1. Paying a Tinker’s Darn to  FTC Guidelines

If you are promoting a brand’s product or service on Instagram, you need to inform your followers that it’s sponsored or paid content. For this, you could simply add #Ad or #sponsored hashtags in your caption.

According to the FTC, there are 1M Instagram influencers who are paid to endorse, but a majority of them fail to disclose that it’s an advertisement. So these influencers who avoid disclosing their relationship with influencers may have to face the US Federal Trade Commission’s wrath.

Checkpoint: To help brands and influencers tackle the FTC guidelines, social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube these days have set-up Disclosure toolS for Influencer Marketing in their backend. Influencers can use these tools to tag brands to signal that the given post is sponsored.

Mistake #2. One-off Affair with the Influencer

You may be sharing a good rapport with your influencer, and your current campaigns are doing very well. But, despite that, you want to hire someone else for your next gig.

This is a common phenomenon in the social media domain because marketers want to try different permutations and combinations. While there’s nothing wrong in experimenting, it’s not practical. And, it’s not necessary that every influencer will live up to your expectations.

Checkpoint: If things are going in the right direction in your current campaign, it simply means the influencer you’ve roped in is absolutely right for your target audience.

So, the bottom line is that when you find an influencer who best-fits with your business needs, establish a long-term relationship with them. Because such an influencer may be able to strike a better chord with your target audience in all your future campaigns.

Mistake#3. Not Replying to Comments

User engagement is vital for audience retention. Even Google gives rankings to posts with higher user engagement. So, it goes without saying that you need to engage with people who are commenting on your posts by replying to their comments on an immediate basis. It’s doesn’t matter whether the user comments are negative or positive, you should maintain your cool while responding.

Read this post on jarvee.com on how a negative comment made by a restaurant owner, in response to a user comment, got bad press.

Checkpoint: Instagram is a customer service tool for businesses. Even a simple ‘thank you’ reply is enough for your business to show customers that you care about them and their opinions.

Also, you can encourage user conversation by asking followers to leave answers to the question you posted in your caption. Let’s say you are posting a selfie of yourself getting ready for Easter — ask your followers what their plans are for Easter.

Mistake #4.  Building Traffic through Bots

You may have been punching above your weight to grow your follower count on Instagram, but then, sadly, things didn’t work out for you. So, what you do is, you resort to buying followers and fake engagements through the use of bots.

But remember: This is just a vanity metric and won’t lead to conversions.

Checkpoint: If you really want to make it big as an influencer, you need to focus on building genuine interactions with users who are really interested in your content. It may sound laborious and painstaking and all, but only through organic growth, you’ll be able to land those brand deals.

Mistake#5. Hijacking Hashtags from Anywhere and Everywhere 

If anything, bizarre hobbies and unique fandoms flood the internet space. So, if you tend to randomly pick up a hashtag for your promotion, without undertaking any research, you could land into trouble.

For instance, when wholesome British baking company Warburton’s used #CrumpetCreations as their holiday Instagram hashtag to highlight special recipes, they didn’t realize they were accidentally using the hashtag used by the furries — a community of people who dress up as anthropomorphic cartoon animals. Which meant, that anyone looking for Warburton’s user-submitted crumpet content got swept into the world of furries.

Checkpoint: Before you launch any hashtag campaign, take a quick look around to see if the tag is used by any other groups or people.

If you seriously want to be an Instagram Influencer, then it’s always nice to know about the pitfalls to avoid making the same errors and be on the right path from day one.