In recent years, Instagram has become a real powerhouse for numerous businesses worldwide. When selling on Instagram, you can create and customize your own visually appealing storefront that contains not only your products, but also people, places, and experiences related to it.
As Instagram’s word-of-mouth marketing features make it one of the best social media channels to make money on, we present you with the 8 most common mistakes businesses make when trying to sell on Instagram. We also provide you with 5 extra tips for selling on Instagram.
But before we delve into any actual examples, let’s briefly examine the platform’s immense marketing potential.
Instagram’s Marketing Potential – Why Consider Selling on Instagram
In 2018, Instagram has officially joined the social media billionaires club. We’re not talking about the revenue (as this milestone was reached back in 2016, while the projections for 2018 predict whopping 6.84 billion from mobile internet advertising only), we’re talking about the number of active users. This June, the number of active monthly Instagram users has finally reached 1 billion, which is a substantial increase if we compare it to 800 million in September 2017.
This ever-increasing number of actively engaged users has caused the platform to gradually shift from just personal to both personal and business use. This claim is supported by the fact that around 71% of US businesses use Instagram nowadays.
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With more than 500 million users active every day and 250 million pieces of content shared every day, Instagram’s marketing potential is enormous. Not only does this mean that Instagram has tons of users, but that they are actively engaged too. Most importantly to our today’s story, Instagram users like to interact with businesses – in fact, 80% of Instagram accounts follow a business.
Instagram Profile Optimization Mistakes
1. No link in the bio
Traffic is like blood pumping through your website’s veins in order to keep it running. If you want to generate traffic to your website from your Instagram profile, you need to include a link to your website in your bio. Yes, it might be Capt. Obvious reporting to duty, but you wouldn’t believe how many businesses actually disregard this.
It could be a link to your homepage, landing page, other social media profile, or a specific product page – it’s up to you. The only important thing is to make sure it’s something relevant to what you’re posting.
How should it be done? Let’s take a look at Airbnb’s Instagram profile.
Airbnb’s bio link takes you directly to theirtap2shop page where you can book directly from their Instagram feed.
2. No CTA
A bio link should be accompanied with a compelling CTA. One without another is generally useless (or at least much less effective than combined).
3. Making your account private
Keeping your personal Instagram profile is perfectly fine. But if selling on Instagram is what you aim to do, you need to keep your business profile publicly available.
After all, you want as many people as possible to engage with your brand on Instagram. And seeing ‘This Account is Private’ notification can be slightly off-putting. People love to have immediate access to what interests them.
By setting your business Instagram profile to private, you’re literally telling your potential customers you don’t want them as your followers. Plus, if they decide to send you a follow request, they need to wait for you to find time to approve it. Take too long to respond and they might be off buying from your competitors.
Instagram Post Optimization Mistakes
4. Posting duplicate content
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Posting duplicate content will quickly get the most loyal followers (because they most actively follow what’s going on on your profile) to unfollow your profile. What they expect at all times is unique and engaging content.
Of course, from time to time, there might be a good reason to repost something, but make sure you tread lightly around this area.
5. Misusing the hashtags
Using hashtags can not only help you build brand awareness, but it can also make selling on Instagram much easier and more efficient. Just as their misuse can ruin your marketing efforts and even make you look ridiculous in front of the community of Instagrammers.
Even though Instagram allows for up to 30 hashtags per post, be careful not to overdo it. Many businesses and brands selling on Instagram have the problem to determine the optimal number of hashtags for their posts. It’s definitely not an easy thing to do and opinions on the topic tend to differ.
According to QuickSprout’s Ultimate Guide to Hashtags, posts with 11 hashtags receive up to 80% interaction, as opposed to posts with just 3 hashtags which receive less than 40% interaction (per 1000 followers). Other studies show significantly different data, so SocialFresh recommends using 7 hashtags, TrackMaven would rather go for 9 hashtags, while Klear states the optimal number of hashtags per post is actually 2.
There’s really no ultimate answer to the question of an optimal number of hashtags to use when selling on Instagram. I would say it depends on your business, the products you offer, and your target audience. So, you just need to test different approaches and see what works best for your specific needs. Also, make sure to use branded hashtags, as studies show that 7 out of 10 hashtags on Instagram are branded.
How to avoid misusing the hashtags? We’ve already given you some guidelines on how to find an optimal number of hashtags (and not overdo it). Another thing to pay attention to when branding your hashtags is to check whether they’re already in use by someone else and what they’re actually used for. In other words, don’t make the same mistake Warburtons did.
The British baking company used the hashtag #CrumpetCreations as a part of their holiday Instagram marketing campaign. Little did they know that they “hijacked” a hashtag already used within the so-called “furry community” (a community of people with a strange hobby of dressing up as cartoon animals).
6. Not interacting with your followers the right way
When someone leaves a comment on your Instagram post, it’s your responsibility to respond as promptly as possible. Responding to comments can help you create brand awareness and build trust with your followers.
Also, selling on Instagram is virtually impossible if you don’t interact with your target audience. Often they will have some additional questions about the products, prices, shipping, availability, and so on. Providing them with a prompt response could be a nudge towards turning them into customers.
Not replying to comments can actually be interpreted as not caring about your followers and potential customers.
To make sure your followers see your replies, make sure to mention them in your reply using a “@” tag. When you do it, they get a notification, which will get them back to your profile. It’s just like some sort of manual remarketing.
It’s not just promptness that you need to pay attention to. This should probably go without saying, but you need to treat your potential customers with respect. And not call them“fat and full of cholesterol” or “idiots” just like Dolce and Gabbana co-founder did this one time.
7. Posting content at the wrong time
While 71% of brands are present on Instagram, 57% of them publish at least one post per week. What does this mean? No matter what you’re selling on Instagram, you’re likely to expect some fierce competition.
How to make sure you come out on top? Even though there are no guarantees, posting at the right times of the day (as well as on the right days in the week) will boost your chances of engaging with your potential customers.
What are the right times to post if you’re selling your products on Instagram?
To find out exactly that, Latergramme analyzed more than 61,000 Instagram posts. Their research has shown that the best times to post on Instagram are 2 am and 5 pm, EST, while the worst times are 9 am and 6 pm (as can be seen in the graph below). As for the days, Wednesdays have the greatest, while Mondays have the least amount of engagement.
So, even if you have the best content on Instagram, it’s worth nothing if nobody gets to see it. Which is why you need to make sure you’re posting at the times when your users are most likely to be active on Instagram.
8. Buying likes and followers
In addition to being considered a fraudulent and unethical activity, buying likes and followers just doesn’t pay off. In most cases, it’s strongly connected to poor ROI.
In an experiment Hootsuite did with buying “1,000 quality followers” for $9.95, the results were poor (and expected). The fact is they did get the promised 1,000 followers but their engagement was ZERO.
Whether your goal is to build brand awareness, generate more leads, or increase sales, fake Instagram accounts and bots just aren’t going to cut it. Instead, you need to try to build a real following, so here are our 14 tips on how to get more followers on Instagram in a natural and effective way.
So far, we’ve presented you with 8 common mistakes businesses are making when trying to sell on Instagram. Now, we’re going to wrap it up with several extra tips that could be beneficial to your business on Instagram.
5 Extra Tips for Selling on Instagram
- Utilize the power of Instagram Stories
- Team up with Instagram influencers
- Try to get your account verified
- Increase your Instagram search visibility
- Capture emails using an online quiz and promote your Instagram store to that list
