What is up everyone.
Welcome back to my channel, the best place for new coaches, content creators and entrepreneurs.
In today's video, I really want to go over some of the worst Instagram advice that I've
ever come across, whether it was on Instagram itself, YouTube or the internet in general.
I thought that this video would be really interesting to make, considering the fact
that there are so many different information pieces online and you don't really know who
to follow and who not to follow.
Now obviously at the end of the day it's your decision on what methods you choose to grow
your account and I think that any method can work for a lot of people, but it really depends
on the individual and it depends on the goals that you want to achieve within your business
or even within not having a business and just growing on Instagram.
That's why I figured that this video would be perfect for those of you who want to know
what I think of some of the strategies that have been thrown around by other people online.
But of course before we dive into that video, I really want to shout out one of my viewers
and subscribers.
Thank you so much for leaving a comment, but on top of this, thank you so much also for
resharing and posting on your Instagram story and shouting me out.
Now, if you want to be featured in my next video, make sure you either do one of the
two following, either comment below on this video or share this video on your Instagram
and tag me so that number one I can reshare you and I can show you out in the next video.
Now with that are the way, let's just dive right into what I think is considered really
bad Instagram advice.
So let's get started.
Now to kick off this video, I'm going to start with an obvious piece of bad advice and that
is buying artificial vanity metrics such as fake followers, fake likes, fake views and
fake comments.
Now obviously if you aren't new to my channel, this shouldn't come to a surprise to you because
I talk a lot about why this is not a good idea for your Instagram account and can actually
damage your account in the long term.
However, I do want to take an opportunity to play devil's advocate and explain to you
why buying vanity metrics does make sense for some people and why they choose to do
it.
Now, the first reason of why people can justify buying fake vanity metrics is because they
want to have that initial injection of followers in order to build authority in their respective
space.
And we see this happening a lot within eCommerce brands.
A lot of eCommerce brands, when they're starting out, they buy fake followers in order to beef
up their accounts and show that other people are actually following them.
Now with e-commerce, this can make sense considering the fact that their consumers are likely not
following their accounts and are buying based on the product alone that's on their website
or maybe within their Facebook ads.
But for smart e-commerce brands, as they slowly grow organically, what they do is they end
up scrubbing a lot of their initial fake followers so that at the end of the day, all their followers
become 100% organic.
Now that method of buying an initial injection of fake followers and then slowly scrubbing
them over time can work for some brands, but it's still risky practice number one, that
you have no idea how Instagram will choose to punish accounts over time.
You will never know whether or not Instagram will suddenly delete your account because
back in the day you used automation, you can never tell what can happen to your account
and imagine losing Instagram account that you've spent a lot of time and money to build,
only to have it disappear overnight because Instagram decided to punish you.
That really sucks.
Not only this, nowadays there are tons and tons of programs that enable consumers and
companies to actually do their due diligence to understand who they're buying from and
whether or not it's inauthentic or authentic, such as social played and hype auditor.
That's why I personally do not recommend ever regardless if you are a service based business
or an eCommerce business to buy your followers because it will just bite you in the bum in
the long term.
Now speaking of service based businesses, I do not recommend buying your bounty metrics
at all.
Now for eCommerce business, I can understand why it might make sense even though I don't
recommend it.
But for service based businesses, this is a terrible mistake for your brand and not
only in the short term but also in the longterm.
And the reason why is because when you sell a service, likely you are also selling yourself
as a personal brand.
Imagine if your prospect looks you up on social blade or on hype auditor and sees that you've
bought a lot of your engagement and you're basically living a lie.
That says a lot about your business, even though you have an amazing service, just the
fact alone that you've decided to go the route to buy your followers, buyer Vanni metrics
erodes a lot of trust that your prospect may have had in you.
Even for me, when I see another coach or a service provider claim that they have a genuine
community and claim that they have all these amazing quality followers.
Yet when I look on social blade or hype auditor, they bought a lot of their engagement or that
they've automated a lot of the follow unfollow on their account.
I immediately lose trust and not just them, but also in their service as well.
That's why if you are a service based business, choosing to go this route of buying your vanity
metrics can not only be a terrible idea, but can also be a risky idea.
That's why if you do want to grow your sales and grow your business in the long term, focus
more on building a quality tribe, even if it's only a thousand followers because I guarantee
that's going to convert more sales for you versus having 100,000 fake followers in your
account.
Now the second piece of bad advice that I see about Instagram is hosting giveaways.
Now, hosting giveaways might sound like a good idea.
It might sound like a very strategic way to grow your Instagram following and it can be,
but the problem is is that I see a lot of people hosting giveaways in the wrong way
that ends up hurting their account in the long term.
Let me explain.
Hosting giveaways can damage your account in the longterm if you don't know how to set
the right parameters for your giveaway.
Now obviously, if you make your giveaway really easy to enter, meaning that the barrier of
entry is really low, that can damage your account in the long term.
Now, obviously in the short term you might get a lot of followers, especially if you
have a really, really good incentive of why someone should join your giveaway and if you
have a really great grand prize, but the problem, time and time again that we see is that over
time after the giveaway is over, you end up losing a lot of followers or you end up having
followers that only followed you for the giveaway and not necessarily for your content.
So at the end of the day, if you don't really understand who you're trying to attract and
set the right parameters to get the right people in your giveaway, then you can really
damage your account in the long term and it can be a waste of time and money.
Speaking of attracting the right people to your giveaway in order to grow your account.
A mistake that I see a lot of people doing is that they create giveaways way too early
in their account.
What I mean by this is that I see some people who don't even have good content, who don't
even know who they want to attract yet and already they're hosting giveaways because
they want to boost that vanity metric, but if your account doesn't already have a strong
foundation for content that will attract and retain a new followers, that giveaway can
really be a waste of time.
That's why choosing to do giveaways as your number one way to grow your account is not
a good idea.
On top of this, the reason why I also chose to include this as a bad advice that I want
to shout out is because a lot of people tell you to do giveaways, but they don't actually
teach you how to run a proper giveaway because what you need to realize is that hosting giveaways
can be a huge pain in the butt if you do not know how to facilitate them properly.
For example, if you decide that you are indeed ready to host giveaways because you want to
thank your existing following base and you want to potentially have your existing followers
shout your giveaway out and attract quality leads into your business and grow your account,
which is the right way to run a giveaway, then you need to consider the following.
Number one, have you read the community guidelines of Instagram?
A lot of people do not read the community guidelines and don't realize that you actually
have to put a disclaimer stating that Instagram has no part in your giveaway in order to protect
yourself legally and from liability with Instagram, and not only this, how are you even going
to protect yourself legally?
Do you have a disclaimer?
Do you have a terms and conditions when people are opting into your giveaway?
Really think about these things.
Not only this, who is eligible for your giveaway?
Is it international?
Is it local?
What are the different time zones?
You really want to think of these things before you announced your giveaway to avoid a lot
of headache.
Not only this, when it comes to shipping, are you going to be paying the shipping fees
or is the winner going to be paying the shipping fees?
These are things again that you want to consider and put into your terms and conditions.
That's why a lot of people tell you to host giveaways, but they don't necessarily coach
you on how to do it the right way so that you are protecting you and your account.
Moving onto the third piece of terrible advice that I see on the internet when it comes to
growing on Instagram is when people tell you not to have a business account.
I think that this is silly advice, especially if you're someone that has a business.
I love having a business account because I can not only tap into my analytics and make
better decisions when it comes to Instagram, but I'm also able to use third party apps
and schedule out my content so that I can save a lot of time as a content creator.
Now just to fill some of you guys in on why people advise other people not to have a business
account is because there is a myth going around that when you have a business account it decreases
your reach and I have a feeling that this myth came because Facebook business pages,
they have less reach because Facebook wants you to buy ads in order to get visibility
and since Facebook owns Instagram, the assumption is is that if you have a business account
you automatically get lower reach.
But in my experience of switching back and forth from personal to business to test out
this myth, I have seen zero negative effects of having a business account and if anything,
I have pretty healthy engagement levels on my account and a lot of that is thanks to
my ability to actually read the analytics and be able to access that analytics in the
first place.
Not only this, having a business account also helps me generate more leads, especially with
the swipe up feature.
If you have a personal account and you have over 10 K followers, you're not going to be
able to access that swipe up feature, which is so important for a lot of businesses.
That's why I call BS on anyone who tells you that a business account is not worth it on
Instagram because I personally think that it's definitely worth it.
All right guys.
Now moving onto the next piece of terrible advice and that is people telling you that
you need to post on Instagram every single day.
Now, I agree that having a good post frequency when you're starting out and you have zero
posts on your account can be important to build up your feed and build up that content
library.
But over time I really do not see the point of needing to post every single day on the
platform, especially now that we have Instagram stories, which makes having activity on Instagram
a lot easier.
Now you might be wondering, Vanessa, why don't you think that posting everyday on Instagram,
is that necessary?
Well, for me it's through experience.
I don't post every single day on Instagram, let alone every single week and I still see
a lot of growth on my account.
Not only this, what I found is that when you are posting content every single day on your
feed, the two outcomes generally happened.
First I would outcome is is that you are going to get burnt out.
You're eventually going to run out of ideas, you're going to run out of content and you're
going to end up putting bad content or not post any content at all, which makes you very,
very inconsistent.
Not only this.
The second outcome that can happen is you are bombarding your audience and you're training
your audience to expect content from you every single day versus when you space it out and
you actually let time for your audience to breathe.
When you do post a piece of content, you might find yourself having much more engagement
on that post.
For example, if I was posting on my Instagram account every single day, yes, I might get
the likes, I might get the comments, but over time people are going to say, Oh, there's
Vanessa again, posting something else again, Oh, what does she have today for us versus
when I post every other week or post every other day or maybe only three times a week,
that content piece becomes a little bit more special.
Now keep in mind, for my Instagram strategy, I'm always on Instagram stories.
Instagram stories is what I'm on daily to ensure that Instagram can see that I have
a lot of activity going on, but when it actually comes to more of the richer form content such
as feed posting, I do not do that every day because I don't want to burn out and I also
want to make sure that my audience looks forward to my content when I do post it.
Now, at the end of the day, I am not trying to dictate what your post schedule should
look like because that is entirely up to you.
But what I am saying is that you should never sacrifice the quality of your content just
to meet a quantity threshold.
If you feel like you need to pump out X amount of content, but that's going to compromise
the quality of your content on Instagram, then I don't think that that is necessary,
especially if you already are daily engaging with your followers as much as you can.
Showing Instagram that you are an active account, building those relationships with people daily
on Instagram stories are on DM.
I have a feeling that you can get away with not posting on your feed every other day or
at least that's how it's worked for my account.
That's why if someone is putting a gun to your head and telling you that in order to
succeed on Instagram, you need to post every day, then I definitely call that bad advice.
Now, so far in this video, we talked a lot about the bad advice.
I see a lot around the internet regarding Instagram.
If you actually want to tap into good advice or advice that I preach, make sure you join
my free Facebook group.
Turn your followers into clients where I dive deeper into strategies on how you can actually
convert your followers into clients for your business.
Not only this, make sure you also hit the notification bell in order to not miss any
future videos for me as well.
In the meantime, while you wait for my next video for next Sunday, make sure you also
check out these two videos that I have right here.
I talk a lot about marketing, social media and coaching, so again, make sure you check
out these videos as well.
As always, guys, I appreciate you.
I hope you guys have a great day, a great week, and a great life, and I'll see you in
the next one.
Bye guys.