There’s no shortage of influencers out there in the world today. However, many of them continue making the same “influencer mistakes,” and it’s keeping them from becoming as successful as they could be in terms of partnering with their ideal brands or reaching their target audience.
If you’re new to the content creation world, learning from the mistakes of the influencers that came before you are essential to your success.
10 Influencer Mistakes That You Should Avoid:
Consider these the top10 influencer mistakes that you need to avoid making at all costs:
1. Saying “Yes” To Everyone
Saying “yes” to working with every single brand that approaches you is one of the biggest rookie influencer mistakes, and it’s all too often.
As an influencer, there are two things you need to consider: Your values and your audience.
It takes a lot of time, effort, and consistent content to gain trust and build up a loyal following. If you start promoting any business that throws money at you, you’ll start losing your authenticity and with that, your followers’ trust—and then your followers.
That means you need to take the time to evaluate whether each brand or agency in question shares your values and aligns with your niche before agreeing to the deal. That way you can remain consistent with your content and keep your authenticity and followers’ trust intact.
2. Not Joining a Network
Influencer networks or marketplaces are platforms that provide brands with vetted influencers they can connect with. If you want to make consistent money as an influencer, joining one of these networks is a must.
By signing up with an influencer marketing program, you’ll be able to directly connect with the types of brands you want to work with. Those brands will also have a direct way of contacting you as well as access to your analytics and stats regarding any campaigns you’ve run within that network.
3. Misusing Hashtags
Hashtags make the social media world go round as they make your content discoverable. They also encourage audience engagement and interaction as their reach gets more eyes on your content.
Most importantly, they allow you to build your following by promoting your personal brand on Instagram. The key is to implement hashtag best practices to ensure they don’t end up working against you.
For example, using too many hashtags in one post can come off as spams and off-putting, which is one of the many influencer mistakes you want to avoid in general. Therefore, it’s best to use anywhere between two and five hashtags. Additionally, you want to ensure you’re using relevant hashtags, as in the already existing and trending hashtags—not something you just made up on the spot.
4. Posting Too Much Sponsored Content
A major part of being a successful influencer is working with brands and promoting their products or services. Another major part of it is understanding how and when to post certain types of content.
In other words, you need to stagger your posts containing partnerships. Otherwise, your social media channels are going to start looking like a collection of sales pages from the backend of a cheap magazine. Your followers won’t like this as it’s another thing that can come off as spams and inauthentic.
So, make sure that the majority of your posts consist of original content and that the sponsored ads are sprinkled sparingly throughout.
5. Ignoring FTC Guidelines
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a government agency meant to protect the public from unfair or deceptive marketing practices. Under the FTC guidelines, influencers are mandated to disclose any brand partnership information within their posts when promoting a product or service.
That means with every brand promotion, you’re required to highlight that it’s either a paid or sponsored post. If you ignore the FTC’s requirements, you’ll be subject to penalties and other liabilities.
Dishonesty is also a bad look for your personal brand.
6. Not Niching Down
As mentioned earlier, one of the most important things you need to consider as an influencer is your niche—and not just your general niche.
It’s more important now than ever to get specific about your passion or idea. Having over a million followers is great, but having 50,000followers or less can be even more powerful as it allows you to connect with your quality followers on a deeper level.
For example, being a dog owner is a general niche. But what exactly is it about owning a dog that’s special to you, and what about dog ownership is it that you want to convey to your audience? Are you passionate about ending the stigma of aggression surrounding pit bulls? Are you all about proper dog training? Dog health and wellness?
Whatever it is, niche it down as much as possible so you can target a specific audience and brands to work with. It’ll also help you to continue posting relevant and consistent content—which is exactly what your followers expect to see when they visit your page.
7. Wasting Money on Fake Followers
Fake followers are like smoking cigarettes. Everyone knows they’re bad for you, but so many people still do it anyway, even if it’s just for a little while.
While smoking is bad for your physical health, buying followers and likes is bad for your social media health.
Why?
Because these “followers” don’t engage with any posts. Follower engagement is the key to being a successful influencer—and no, the bots that comment aren’t any better. In fact, they’re a serious cybersecurity threat.
Not to mention, having a bunch of fake followers will destroy your reputation. It’s just one of the influencer mistakes you want to avoid at all costs. Focus on creating quality content instead.
8. Using Low-Quality Images
Most social media platforms are already incredibly competitive, which means you need to do everything you can to stand out from the crowd.
Since most platforms rely on photo and video sharing, posting low-quality images will undoubtedly hurt your personal brand.
So, do yourself a favor and invest in a good camera, lighting tools, and the best photo editing tools you can afford to ensure that each photo or video you take can be enhanced to its best version. You may also want to look into purchasing photo presets to help cultivate a more cohesive aesthetic for your page.
9. Not Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due
There will come a time when you want to share content from another influencer if it’s something that reflects your values and you know that your followers will jive with. In fact, influencers share other influencers’ content all the time.
Just make sure that if and when you choose to share someone else’s content, you ALWAYS include an original photo credit within your description. If you don’t let your followers know that the content is coming from another creator, then you’re essentially passing it off as your own.
Even if it wasn’t your intention, it’s still stealing.
10. Focusing Only on One Social Media Platform
A lot of influencers are sticking to only one or two social media platforms, especially Instagram and TikTok. However, relying on just one platform to make your money is a pretty risky move.
As an influencer and content creator, you want to make the most of the marketing tools out there. That means going beyond the traditional social media apps and branching out to other content platforms such as TrueFanz.
TrueFanz is quickly becoming a leading influencer marketing platform as it offers its influencers top-level features and tools that allow them to take their content to the next level. It’s also not algorithm-based, which is what separates it from other content platforms as well as Instagram.
While anyone can become a social media influencer, not everyone can become successful at it. As you can see from the above list, there are plenty of influencer mistakes that drive followers and brands away.
Fortunately, signing up with TrueFanz is not one of those influencer mistakes. Request your invite today and start connecting with your followers on a deeper level.
