7 Mistakes Hurting Your Instagram Growth

To increase your Instagram growth, it’s essential to try things out. Trial and error are the keywords. But before you blindly do everything that the box of possibilities has to offer, it can quickly backfire. Everything has already been tried out by other influencers. At this point, it makes sense to get this experience before you try things that others have already failed with. In this article, you’ll learn seven things you shouldn’t do on your Instagram journey.

1. Competitive Thinking

You want to be big in a specific niche? Then you MUST interact with other, preferably bigger, accounts from your niche. Follow them, share likes and comments and give each other advice. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that one same niche account will take away your followers because people only want to follow one travel account – that’s wrong.

Over a billion people use Instagram worldwide. The market is big enough and travel, pet, or food enthusiasts don’t follow just one theme account. With mutual support, you can trigger the Instagram algorithm and grow much faster than you would alone.

2. Buying Followers

Just about everyone who uses Instagram for business, or at least plans to use it for business one day, has thought about this at some point. Buying followers is incredibly easy, much faster than the natural way, and not that expensive anymore. However, before you buy Instagram followers, you should know that your account can lose any perspective very quickly after that. Why?

Instagram’s algorithms are smarter than some might imagine. It recognizes it when a conspicuously large number of new followers are achieved in a short period of time and the profiles of the followers also look suspicious.

As a rule, the purchased followers are not real people – only sparse accounts with a picture in the feed. In addition, Instagram expects more engagement on your posts with your larger number of followers. Of course, the engagement increases through purchased followers not. This makes it impossible for posts to go viral since your engagement/follower ratio is always below what would be necessary. It’s also pretty easy to identify accounts that bought fake followers by looking at their stats on socialblade for example. This might result in fewer business requests.

3. Don’t Follow Just Anybody

If you follow accounts in the hope that they will follow you back, then you should stop that. Again, this is basically because of the Instagram algorithm. It recognizes what you are doing and rates your account as one that “must” use follow 4 follow to gain attention. Furthermore, it looks very unattractive in the profile if you follow thousands of other profiles. Who wants to follow a spam account?

4. Don’t Post at Wrong Times

Many surely already know it. Imagine you come across a post, which has huge potential to go viral. The post was shared only a few hours ago and not yet reposted by other themepages. As happy as you are that you discovered the post so early, you immediately uploaded it to your own profile. But then. Average performance. You wonder why?

If you post while 80% of your followers are asleep your post can still be so brilliant. It won’t go viral. So save your post for a few more hours until it makes sense.

Check out point 4 in our recent article “6 Easy Tricks to Trigger The Instagram Algorithm” to learn more about the right posting time.

5. No Interaction

Once you get a little bigger, you might quickly stop interacting with other accounts. This is not good, because interactions make you much more popular with the Instagram algorithm and make your followers more likely to interact with you. Respond to comments. Reply to messages. Like others’ posts. The motto is: Don’t just take, give. It will pay off.

6. Using Bots

Especially for the interactions, it’s near to use a bot. There are actually tools that do a very good job of this and can increase your own engagement a bit. But in most cases, sooner or later Instagram will find out that you are using an automation tool on your account. In the past, Instagram used to force users to log in again as soon as the bot was active again. How much this offense affects the overall performance of the account remains uncertain.

What is certain, however, is that the automation is against Instagram’s terms and conditions and that more severe penalties, such as the account’s ban, could be enforced if the account has already attracted negative attention with copyrights or similar issues.

7. Being Afraid of Using Instagram’s New Features

All new features on Instagram offer a huge opportunity. Of course, Instagram wants these to be adopted and used. You could think of it as rewarding the early adopters with more reach. If you always let these new features pass you by, you’re not only missing out on huge opportunities, but you’re also going to have huge difficulties growing at some point. Just look at what Stories has become. Reels are also becoming more and more popular… who posts only pictures on Instagram anymore?

With these seven tips, you can save yourself a lot of time by getting it right from the start.

If you know some more important mistakes to avoid on Instagram, feel free to share it in the comments!

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