Stay Away From These 5 Things on Instagram

1. Don’t follow random account with no purpose

This is mentioned in my post How to Get Followers on Instagram. Do not follow accounts that aren’t in your niche or related in another way. This is a waste of time and a waste of a ‘following’. If you are a personal trainer, don’t go following an account for farmers (unless reasonable). Follow accounts as necessary. You could be a personal trainer and follow gym centres or weightloss programs to drum up business. This is because the ultimate goal is trying to grow engagement. You want people to interact with your account. You want comments, likes, tags, features etc. There is no benefit in having followers who are not interested in your content (or you for theirs).

2. Don’t post too many photos

This one is obvious. If you post too many photos, your followers can get fed up with you for clogging up their feed. I know it is tempting to get heaps of content out there for more people to see it, but that’s generally not the case. It is better to have 50 wonderful, well thought of posts than 2,000 photos just spit out. I know that when I go to my insta feed, I want to be seeing different followers’ content. If I see too many photos from one person (unless amazing content), I may unfollow them because you can only see something from so many angles until you think I’ve had enough. It sounds a little harsh, but too many posts, is too many posts. I would recommend no more than two posts a day.

3. Don’t buy followers

Do not fall into this trap. There are a lot of options out there to buy followers, and some are probably legitimate. But a lot are also bad hacks. Literally. People have gone and hacked into accounts and sign them up to these programs so that when you buy followers you get them sent to your account. You will find that if you buy 10,000, probably 8,000 will unfollow you. I admit, I looked into it and researched it as an option and there are videos on Youtube showing that they unfollow you and also never engage in your content. You do not want to have 10,000 fake followers, post a photo and get no likes or comments. Everyone will know something’s off here.

4. Don’t follow/unfollow (until you’re instafamous)

This is hard to stay away from, I see this with accounts with 300 followers and they will go add you and you may follow them back and a few minutes later they unfollow you. This is bad social behaviour and is looked down upon. If you are reading this and want to grow you account, do not do this. You need to network, so follow people that have interesting related content and get talking to them and amalgamate in their base.

5. Don’t be fake

Do not post fake captions, stories, photos that aren’t yours, or lie about who you are. Lies always catch up with you. If you have made poor choices – own them, share them, guide others through your captions. As much as IG is a platform  where you can be anybody, the world doesn’t need another ‘cliche’ they want ‘you!’ If you have a fake account/personality/lifestyle you will have to keep this up, and that’s a lot of energy in keeping up appearances. I always say, why fit in when you were born to stand out.

Be sure to head over to my Instagram account so we can connect!