Did you know that Instagram has more than 700 million users and more than 400 million users are active every day? This makes it twice the size of Twitter. The pace at which the number of Instagram users is increasing is overwhelming. It doubled its user base from 350 million users to 700 million users in just two short years from 2015 to 2017. All this makes Instagram a great platform for digital marketing and offer a world of opportunities for businesses. Here are seven Instagram mistakes that digital marketers should never make.

Ignoring Your Target Audience

If you expect to shot to fame just by creating an account on Instagram, then you are wrong. Just like on any other social networking website, you should look to build relationships and lay a foundation of a community of your loyal customers. This would only happen when you respond to follower questions promptly and share content generated by followers. Follow other relevant users and start engaging with you audience by asking and answering questions.
Buying Followers

There is no doubt that instagram is a lucrative digital marketing channel. That is why most digital marketers want to stay on top of it by any means. As a result, they prefer to buy followers and engagement, which is not the right way to go about it. Hootsuite conducted an experiment by creating a fake instagram account and purchased instagram followers.

The results of the experiment revealed that there is zero engagement despite winning 150 million Instagrammers. Moreover, when they analyzed their audience, they found that a big percentage of audience is either teenagers doing silly things on Instagram or bots. It would be much better if you make a strategy and try to build relationships to increase your audience instead of buying dumb followers.

Preferring Quantity over Quality

There is a common misconception among businesses that if you post frequently on Instagram, you will get the result. That is true until the increase in post frequency does not take its toll on quality, which is mostly not the case. If you closely study some of the best brands on Instagram, you will come to know that their instagram posts focuses on quality and value delivery. MAC cosmetic brand is the best example in this regard. They posted few high quality photos and managed to earn 33,000 likes within no time. By focusing on quality, they have managed to increase the number of followers to more than 200,000 per month.

Going Overboard With Promotion

One of the biggest reasons behind lower engagement is over promotion. Irrespective of how loyal you are to a brand, you will eventually get bored and lose interest if they continuously promote their brand on social media. Forrester endorses that point through their research, which revealed that more and more brands are using social media but the engagement levels are dwindling. The situation did not improve even after increasing the posting frequency.
Instagram posts from brands managed interaction from 4.2% of followers but it fell to 2.2%, which is quite dismal. The more they force the issue, the poorer the result. Brands will have to rethink their strategy in order to get better user engagement and avoid going overboarding with promotions.

Abusing Hashtags

Misusing hashtags is a common practice among social media marketers. They have been using this tactic for quite a while now on Facebook and Twitter. Now, they have started to abuse hash tags on Instagram as well. With a generous limit of 30 hashtag per post on Instagram, there is no one stopping digital marketers to abuse hashtags.
Unfortunately, what most digital marketers do not understand is they can achieve much better results by using fewer relevant hashtags instead of going overboard with it. The best example in this regard is Go Pro, whose instagram followers are growing by 221,000 per month just because they use fewer and relevant hashtags with their posts.

Not Making the Most of Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are one of the most popular features of Instagram with more than 200 million users using it. It is a unique feature that enables users to post combine multiple photos and video and play it in the form of a slideshow that expires after 24 hours. Brands can use Instagram stories to tell a story or deliver value. Be authenticated and go crazy with your creativity to get the best out of Instagram stories.

No Link in Bio

Another come mistake made by social media marketers is that they do not provide a link in bio. Did you know that Instagram generates 1.2 billion likes per day and more than 1000 comments per second? But, if you are not providing them the link to your website, you will be missing out on a big opportunity to bring a lot of traffic to your website. A link in the bio or Instagram post can make a world of difference. More people will visit your website, read your blogs and increase your sales.

Conclusion

Whether your goal is to generate more traffic for your website, increase your fan base or build brand loyalty, Instagram will not disappoint you. Never purchase Instagram followers or go overboard with promotions. Use hashtags and Instagram stories effectively. Lastly, do not forget to add a link to your bio to get more website traffic and clicks. Just avoid all these aforementioned mistakes and you can easily get the best results from Instagram. If you know about any other mistake digital marketers make on Instagram, feel free to share it with us in comments section below.