If you’re on instagram for your business, chances are you’ve made one of these mistakes at one point or another. Luckily, we’ve come up with some ways to avoid these mistakes.

Using the same hashtags every time. Use hashtags that are extremely specific for your content. Ex: If you’re a therapist and you wrote a post about divorce, find good hashtags for divorce. If you run a beauty salon and are posting about specials, use hashtags that are specific for those specials only. Don’t use #hair when you’re posting about facials.
BONUS: This is what I do to make this process easy. I have a note in my phone to organize good quality hashtags that represent common themes of posts that I write. So I have a section for Business Tips, Small Business, Women Centric, Quotes, Freebies etc. Within each section there are usually some things relating to graphic or web design. But they work for the specific content I made. helps me speed up the process of posting.

Killing yourself by trying to always come up with new content.
If you’re running your business, you don’t got time for that. Period. So when you first create the content, spend some time on it, make something useful or entertaining for your audience. You get major bonus points if it’s both useful and entertaining. Next, use the heck out of what you created. And then, re-use it! You know how you get an average of 10% of your social media following to like your post? That means only 10% got to see it the first time. If you made something actually GOOD for your audience, reposting your content won’t upset people. How many reminders do you set on your phone when you have something important to remember?

Using hashtags where your competition is. I see this all the time. Designers using #graphicdesign. Realtors using #realtor salons using beauty… Now, I get why they’re doing it. But here’s why you should branch out: your customers, audience, and dream clients are not looking at the same hashtags that your competition is using. Also. Those basic hashtags are extremely saturated. Good luck getting found out of a million other accounts! So if you’re a realtor use hashtags where your competition is hanging out only. Most industries have specialty hashtags. And if you’re a brick and mortar business you can always use location based hashtags. #portlandgraphicdesign for example. If you do your work remote, try to think of out of the box hashtags where your audience is looking may be looking. When in doubt, look at your competition ;)

Avoid These 3 Instagram Mistakes Like The White Walkers.