Lessons

Lesson Info

Common Instagram Mistakes

common mistakes having no strategy okay think we kind of covered that right everything we do on instagram if we have if we have an instagram account that's branded for our business everything we do support our business supports our brand supports us that the sharing of who we are with our target market summarise that skipping out on quality we're photographers ondas photographers there's no excuse for us to put uh images that aren't consistent with our quality on instagram right infrequent posting I am guilty of infrequent posting okay this's something I'm constantly working towards how do I get into a daily if I could get daily on instagram we just be killing it multiple times a day two three times a day is absolutely ideal okay you don't wanna overwhelm people but you also don't want underwhelmed by posting you know once every two months they will on follow you you know they'll go through their followers they've got too many followers there like I got to get rid of people haven't see...

n from him or seen anything from jared in like three months he's out so to keep our following we wanted we want to take care of them hashtag usage so when you use those shady hashtags hashtag spur likes kind of stuff you're going you decrease your brand quality and probably lose some people that way over promotion so you know if we in the fall we don't really shoot families we just shoot we should only focus on weddings but maybe in the fall we thought about this for the last five years and never done it would be so easy to make a couple thousand dollars by offering many sessions just here's two weeks of many sessions you know reserve your fifteen minute block right we could post that on instagram and probably fill our schedule be easy to do that but if I post a special every week on instagram especially I'm just a wedding photographer I'm definitely going toe exhaust my following so we're going to careful about promoting and not over promote but it is okay if we promote from time to time maybe we've got a special maybe we've got a contest something like that keeps our followers engaged and then lastly common mistake purchasing followers you can you can purchase thousands of followers right now but your engagement is going to be super low when people are gonna wonder boy this guy's got forty thousand followers people like this image really bizarre right so we want to watch out for that don't purchase fall over instagram actually just about a year ago or six months ago maybe they actually there was a lot of spam out there they just flushed all the spam bots out and everyone's followers just got cut down I think justin bieber lost a few million followers so anyway really common sense thing just don't do stupid things I was waiting for a justin bieber reference on this creative live I'm glad we got that and I don't have stats on justin bieber was I I'm happy to jump into that no you know we got it covered I think we're good I just I just wanted to mention of justin bieber I'm glad we took care of that done done alright great any final thoughts on instagram break out your brand that's the number one thing create created unique brand separate from your personal instagram account that's way could sum up everything do that okay and nurture a falling developed a following there because when you have a link to your instagram account on your but that's one of our number one outbound links from our website is our instagram account really interesting they'll come to our facebook page second instagram is one of the number one outbound links incredible let me check in with russ here and see if you want to do any questions on instagram before we jump over to pinterest I know we're always tied on time thank you were joining us so much really appreciate it quick question for janice foley and a lot of other people are asking this do you feel like it's frowned upon to use professional images on instagram as opposed to iphone or other phone images and do you think stamping your logo on it is a good or bad thing what's great question two part question one four are branded in instagram page I don't think it's frowned upon to use professional images were photographers I think I think we should be expected to have professional images on our instagram feed filling our personal instagram feed with professional shots may get a little bit tacky but if we separate our our two identities were literally separate those two identities I think we're really safe there water marking its a big big question and we've got that's going toe is going to come across instagram as well as pinterest do we watermark are images because images can speak grabbed and stashed all the time here my philosophy is no no watermarks especially for instagram this's pure opinions I just wanted to just one a little bastard right there this is my opinion that water marks look tacky and instagram they know who you are it's right there it's right there following you it says it right there if people are stealing your three inch by three inch image and you're concerned about that from instagram boy how big a picture they're gonna print of that and of course they're going images are going to get stolen everywhere they're stolen all the time from our website but on instagram it just doesn't feel necessary to do that often now everyone's while maybe doing a a post of your logo maybe it is a curious interesting way of posting your logo that's cool little brand recognition there but really your brand is you your logo is very much secondary so make sure on instagram they're falling in love with your pictures your pictures tell the entire story about your brand um water marking them or having your logo on them is is a bit overkill for instagram especially great question from three you wanna know the answer this one what images do you share on instagram your own or others that you find and how does it connect to your site so I think the question being like on facebook people will share it out means or other general cool things that they like so do you on ly share your own images on instagram or others as well good question ninety five percent my images um ninety percent my images five percent at most either I'm going repost images from brands that I follow that I think are consistent with my my audience or you know if I've got something quirky and it's consistent with who we are I could just see myself painting one of those little cartoons and has something to do with you know I'm fly fishing today something insisted with me so yes but I think instagram is maura about more about sharing your content so I would say that that's fine to do but the majority of your work the majority of the content and instagram should be yours right her perfect two more questions someone says I just got an instagram like within two seconds of posting does geo tagging get more views um not necessarily mohr itt's definitely handy but that's not probably not coral it are probably not probably because of that instant like there are there are programs out there that people will run and again it's room pretty much clear this stuff out but if you have a light within like two seconds either that's impeccable timing or someone has some program working to like every image that's just just whatever that hashtag is if it's that fast sometimes those whenever I get likes immediately that's a little suspicious or just really great timing does that make sense yeah but I definitely am a fan of geo tagging again it says if I'm a wedding photographer I'm shooting in vail I post this picture from bail I geo tagging in vail all of that the core messages I'm saying is I am in vail and I'ma bail wedding photographer that's everything that I want to be saying in that message great when I lied I think I'm gonna ask two more now so no one of them derek elsie and a few others want to know are you asking the couple's permission to poster images on instagram first money objectives to other seeing the images before they d'oh so can you talk a little bit about the timing of your instagram posting along with say blogging it delivering to your clients etcetera super question I will answer that question again at the last light of this entire presentation is yes way always have our client's permission before we share our clients always see their images before they hit our blawg or or hit instagram or had any social media s o our clients give us permission when they signed our agreement to give us permission to share images but out of courtesy we always make sure that they have an image in their in box or via text message if I do win engagement you I love that image I literally take a picture of the back of my camera it goes to them first they reply we love this picture then I can posted to social media just a quick story our way when we got married our images were posted on a blogger before we saw them it was just such a huge bummer our friends were commenting and telling us oh such great pictures were like what pictures not a great experience and if we want we want to keep clients referring clients we want to make sure they're very happy so clients first then blogging instagram social media blast great and then maybe one final question that kind of leads into pinterest somebody saying would you repost the same posts on facebook instagram and pinterest absolutely absolutely cross platform post everywhere it's not you don't have the same followers on all of those platforms some people will see a post here opposed to your post here but there's not that much overlap s o I whenever I post instagram I cross post everywhere every time on instagram you actually going to instagram settings and have it post either to your personal facebook feed or your facebook page so my instagram feed oh when I post to instagram I have it set to post to my facebook page so that makes more sense I have my personal instagram posting to my wall so there's a nice little business separation that you could do inside of instagram everything goes to twitter because I don't I don't really care about twitter's I just send everything that way wei have one question from our audience and then we'll move right into instagram are in a pinterest go ahead and take on after that great so you mentioned a statistics for who uses pinterest do you have any statistics on who uses instagrammers that can everyone it's kind of everyone and I do have that my notes right here just grab that so for instagram um oh shoot I don't I had it you khun google that but in general instagram is much more global pinterest uh is huge for women in the united states just such a huge platform instagram is is truly global and for us we've got followers all over the world and I wish they were all in just golden or denver colorado so that's really really where we we do this thing but a lot of our leads will come from around the country for people getting married in colorado and it's really fun when they find us through instagram but I don't have the exact statistics on that except that pinterest is a little more us there's a lot more weight on the u s for pinterest as opposed to instagram this being literally everywhere