Death By Canva and Other Instagram Mistakes Businesses Make
It seems that I’ve talked through a lot all about 5 points below for the past 12 months. I’ve talked about Death By Canva on Instagram Stories, Business Presentations and Training and yet I realised I’d never written them down for mass consumption in a blog
When you read this blog you’ll either want to follow me on social media and read up on everything I do
Or you’ll hate me for saying these things out loud, unfollow me and never want to speak to me again
Some of these below are truly love / hate … but they’re based on 20 years marketing experience and 10 years of social media success for our clients
Death By Canva
Don’t get me wrong when I say the phrase “Death By Canva” – it’s not a criticism of Canva
Canva is great. So is Adobe Spark. And so are many of the great apps out there that allow non graphic designers to produce graphics
Just like “Death By Powerpoint” it’s not the tool itself, it’s the user behind it
There’s a whole industry built up of Virtual Assistants knocking up a few Canva Images for clients and calling it social media management
The problem with Death By Canva is the posts have Zero Personality; use the same quotes as everybody else; and forget that people buy from people
If you want to see this in action simply look at #virtualassistant and see how similar every recent image looks
If you follow any PT’s you’ll have more than likely seen a Canva image with the quote “The Only Bad Work Out Is The One You Didn’t Do”
If you’re posting 30 “Death By Canva” images on Instagram a month chances are you haven’t developed an social media strategy or the person you’ve paid to “post regularly on social” hasn’t
Hello (Month)
This is “Death By Canva” at it’s absolute worst – but used so frequent it needs a category of it’s own
Honestly people don’t need to see “Hello August” or “Hello September” images ever again in their life
It says nothing to me about my life. It says nothing to you about your life. It says nothing to your customers about their life or your business
At it’s very basis “Hello (Month)” says to your customers we’ve got nothing to say on social media, but there’s a gap in the calendar and we want to remain visible
The golden rules of social media are to either educate or entertain and let’s face it this does neither
If you want to acknowledge months or seasons take a look at what Innocent (as in the Smoothie brand) do on social media and you’ll understand that entertainment and humour is at the heart of their social media strategy
There needs to be a reason for posting what you post
Dull As F**k Captions
Captions are not an afterthought on Instagram
They’re not an 1 line throwaway after you’ve spend ages on the image … neither are they a made up fairy tale narrative
These are the 3 key elements of success on Instagram
Image – to stop people on the scroll
Caption – to attract a response
Hashtags – to extend the reach of your posts
As you can see the Instagram caption is a huge part on that
When you think about the type of response you want – a comment means more than a like, so why would you risk not getting a reply with a dull as f**k caption
I heard quote on a podcast recently that described copywriting as this
“Copywriting is closing in print”
Now translate that to social media and the phrase means something in the digital world
Underposting / Overposting
There are 3 types of people on Instagram
There are the types that post consistently – not necessarily daily, but several times a week
And then there are
– Those that under-post and maybe turn up every few weeks and get forgotten about
– Those that login and post 6-10 times a day showing off every single item they sell
You have to understand the rhythm of Instagram and what is the right amount for your customers
You can undersell or over post and both are a dangerous zone to be in
If you look at our instagram @altrinchamhq you’ll see we have a very specific theme
– 6 behind the scenes photos
– Testimonial
– Social Media Tip
– Testimonial
That helps us to both post consistently and stay true to our message and tick both the education and entertainment
Not Using Instagram Stories
A couple of stats for you here
– 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day
– One third of the most viewed stories are from businesses
There’s an opportunity there and so many small businesses aren’t taking it
And many of these that are using stories are simply sharing their Instagram feed posts to stories rather than posting unique content to Instagram stories
When stories disappear in 24 hours (Unless saved to highlights) you gain that attention as people don’t want to miss out
Produce something worth watching, something worth messaging you over or something worth engaging with
AND ALL OF THIS ABOVE IS DOWN TO HAVING NO SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
Social Media Marketing and “Posting on Social Media” are 2 entirely different things
My mum posts on social media. My friends post on social media. The bloke on the next table in the pub posts on social media
Social Media Strategy is different
It takes marketing experience and deep thought about
– Why are you using social media?
– What goals do you have for social media?
– What do you need to do to achieve that?
– Who will produce the content and what is your content calendar?
– How will you measure the success of your marketing?
And that is just the start of it
If you just want to keep “Posting on social media” keep posting – but if you want results then maybe you need to take it seriously
NEED HELP WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA?
Chat to us about Social Media Marketing for YOUR organisation , so we can better understand YOU and what will grow your organisation
We can only find out what is unique to your business by chatting with you
Look at our Social Media Training and Social Media Management services
We offer Social Media Training on
* LinkedIn
* Instagram
* Facebook
* Twitter
* Blogging
We can do this
* 121
* Corporate Workshops
* Group Workshops
* Face to Face or Via Zoom / Skype
Please call Alex on 07806774279 or email alex@altrinchamhq.co.uk
