Nowadays, for any brand looking to gain traction, especially in the competitive beauty industry, a social media presence is a non-negotiable. While big brands can lean on their marketing team or outsource to a dedicated social media manager, the reality for most independent businesses, is it’s a job absorbed by the owner.

Between dealing with ever-changing, complex algorithms and responding to DMs, mistakes are bound to happen. But here’s the thing: most of the mistakes we’re making are avoidable.

Later.com, the number one Instagram scheduler, reached out to their network of social media managers and marketers to get their biggest “icks”.

Below, are a few of the most common mistakes businesses make on social media.

Links in Instagram Captions

Why? They’re unclickable and visually unappealing. Plus, you’re not able to copy and paste a caption — so the likelihood of remembering a long URL and then typing it out is slim to none. Best practice is to drive followers to click the link in your Instagram bio. There are multiple websites that offer this service for free, like Later’s Linkin.bio tool.

QR Codes on social

Much like including links in Instagram captions, adding QR codes to social graphics is not user-friendly. The only way a follower can scan the QR code, as it’s on their screen, is to use another phone in close proximity. Instead, Later.com recommend investing time in a method that drives traffic more effectively, like a link sticker in Instagram Stories.

Not using camel case for hashtags

Hashtags are an important part of the discovery experience on social media — but writing them improperly is an impactful (and common) mistake. Using #CamelCase (capitalising each word in your hashtag) makes your content more accessible to those who have a vision impairment or experience blindness.

Liking your own posts

This doesn’t refer to liking the post from your personal account but liking the company’s post from the company account. Social media managers caution against it because followers do notice and it’s considered unprofessional or—for lack of a better word—cringe.

TikTok watermarks on reels 

Repurposing content across TikTok and Instagram is totally fine, experts say. For a small business, your time is valuable, so a shortcut is always a great hack. However, a lingering TikTok watermark on Reels can impact your feed post ranking on Instagram. But don’t fret, you can remove TikTok watermarks for seamless reposts. 

Buying fake followers

People can tell when you’ve purchased Instagram followers. The first giveaway? Your comment section is flooded with emoji strings and comments that don’t relate to the content. Secondly, your engagement isn’t consistent with your following, again signalling your account is illegitimate. Not only does purchasing followers tarnish the integrity you’ve spent hours building, but it will stunt your growth and risk your business being banned from the platform.