We mostly heard these strategies all over social media and need to improve, this is absolutely bad advice. In this article, we give you popular Instagram tips you need to stop following. We always talk about how you can improve your content and grow on Instagram organically. There is so much advice out there that’s super popular, but also completely wrong that needs to be addressed.
Table of Contents
1. Reposting:
Reposting other creators’ posts may be bad to roll on Instagram, but it’s definitely the wrong strategy. Let’s quickly look at the Instagram community guidelines. The very first point they make is that you should only share photos or videos you’ve taken or have the right to share and not post anything you’ve copied or collected from the internet.
This is where the supposedly magic trick is falling into pieces quickly. When reposting is done without written permission from the original creator, it’s basically stealing and I feel like it’s an important point to make here. But even if you credit someone but still have no express consent, it’s still theft and still against the community guidelines. That creator may be gracious enough or even thank you for sharing, but the truth is they could just as well file an infringement form against you and they’d be in the right here.
we don’t have to explain to you that it’s really bad if it happens and can get you banned if you’re a repeat offender. Many people don’t realize it and mindlessly repost content thinking they’re providing value and actually supporting the creator, but they’re not. It’s piggybacking on someone else’s hard work. If you’ve ever spent time creating even one piece of content, you know very well how much work and thought to go into it. You know it’s a much better way to support a creator.
Share their post, to your stories. Of course, I’m talking about using the share functionality and not reposting stories. When you share it like this, it benefits the creator, but you can also add your two cents to their posts and talk about it from your perspective. Having curated stories like this can really help create value in the community without taking away from the original creator.
Now if all said is still not enough to convince you that reposting is a bad tactic. Maybe this will we have a new update from Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, who has recently announced that the algorithm will reward original content. We don’t know yet what that’s going to look like specifically, but we can be sure that original creators will be favored over reposters or theme pages. Hopefully, this new algorithm update will seriously affect the performance of stolen content, so it’s no longer worth it. we also want people to know that having your content reposted without your permission is not okay, and there’s actually a super-easy way to report it.
In response to this update. we have already seen some people advised to change this reposted content in some way to not have it penalized by the algorithm, and that’s so wrong. Still against the community guidelines and still theft. It can be zoomed in, have new text on it, it can be caught with transitions, but it all doesn’t matter when it’s reposted without permission.
So stay far away from reposting content without permission and maybe consider creating original content yourself. If you really don’t feel like it’s for you, then you need to realize changes are coming, and reposting content, even completely ethically and with permission, is still not going to do as well as original content. It’s just the reality of it.
2. Tagging People with no Relevance:
If you’ve been on IG for a while, you may know that tagging a bunch of big accounts was a tactic back in the day. And let me just say this, five years ago it used to sort of help you grow. I used to do it myself. It was a huge tactic in the travel community, especially tagging big theme pages.
If you don’t know what theme pages are, there are basically those big accounts that feature other creators’ work on them. And by the way, they often repost without the creator’s consent. The main idea was that if you got a report from a big account like that, there would be a percentage of their followers that will actually then cheque out your account if they liked the original photo.
Apart from that, every time you tagged the page, it would appear in their tagged feed, meaning people browsing it would see your posts too. Today, this Instagram tip is outdated at best and annoying and shady at worst. First of all, it’s not really a valid way to get followers anymore. Some people may still cheque you out, but it’s not the same as it used to be. Besides, nowadays creators have much more control over who Tags them in posts.
You can simply enable the manual tag approval feature, which means every time someone Tags you, it doesn’t go straight to your tag feed but instead lands in the pending Tags tab where you can approve it from there. That’s why remember to always tag relevant accounts in your posts because let’s face it, there are better ways to grow than tagging random people.
3. The Follow Unfollow Game:
It’s annoying and in our opinion, slightly disrespectful, and because it’s still very much advertised as this holy grail of Instagram growth when it’s clearly not, at least not in the right way. For those of you who don’t know what follows and unfollow is, it’s basically when you follow other people only to get them to follow you back and then unfollow them after a bit of time. It’s not very sophisticated, you just randomly follow a bunch of people daily and wait for some of them to follow you back. If there’s more thought behind it, you do a bit of research, you try to reach more targeted people.
This usually involves going to big accounts in your niche and seeing who liked or commented on the recent posts and then following them. Now, this is so completely backward, that I can’t even express how much I despise this tactic. First of all, giving people attention only to get attention and then blatantly unfollowing them when your little goal is reached is a lousy way to treat people in general.
You’re basically playing tricks on people. It’s just not a great way to build a tight community that’s engaged and feels appreciated. And may just add, this exactly is a much better goal than chasing vanity metrics in any case. When you get those followers, they essentially did not come to you because they value what you put out there. They became followers to return a favor in a way.
Some of them may appreciate the content over time, but for most of them, seeing your content in their feed is not going to mean much. They will have very little clue as to who you are because they only followed you because you followed them. And even if they checked you out, they didn’t have a strong internal reason to follow you in the first place. People like this are less likely to engage, which in the long run is actually harming your account. When they don’t engage, your engagement rate drops, the algorithm notices you may not be the right account to show to similar people, and eventually, your reach drops too.
we not even going to mention how much time goes into playing the following unfollowing game time that you could be spending on learning about your audience and improving your content. If you overdo it and follow too many people per day or unfollow too many, you can be flagged by Instagram for suspicious activities and banned from following or unfollowing for a day or two. We hope you know that it’s not really good for your account, and if you get a strike like that a few times, you can get temporarily or permanently banned.
4. DM-ing to get Engagement:
Another tactic to boost your visibility is sending posts to random people asking for them to like, share or comment. The same goes for commenting on their profile, saying “oh, I love this post, it’s so good. I’d appreciate it if you checked my account out” This is not how engagement works. Just like with the previous point, sliding into someone’s DMs to ask for them to interact with the post will only get people to do them a favor of sorts.
They may show their support at that moment, but if that engagement didn’t come naturally to them, chances are without another DM, they’re not going to keep it up. The Instagram algorithm recognizes engagement and shows your content to people who interact with you more regularly. If this interaction doesn’t happen more, it’s going to mean that the content may not be as good because they didn’t engage again, so it must not be right.
We always relate the social media world to how the real world operates because it should be based on the same principles. Just as you wouldn’t come up to random people in a shop asking to like and comment on your post, you shouldn’t do that on IG, by all means, slide into your best friend’s DM if you feel like it and say you’ve just posted because they care about you and will gladly support you, and we sure they would have done it without you even asking.
5. DM-ing to getting Business:
Staying on the subject of DMs, here’s one of my biggest pet peeves on IG called DMs that seem very friendly, offering to genuinely connect with the fellow creator only to then start pitching you something in the next few sentences. This is not a way to grow on IG, let alone do business. Cold calling may have a place in time, but this ain’t it.
