I messed up with Instagram!

Preamble

I went through a phase in my content creation when I would be asking other people what I should do. Should I post videos about this or something else etc? But I have eventually moved away from this model Now I am focusing more on what I want to create. Rather than watching 100s of YouTube videos and then swapping from one platform or piece of software to another. I have had a go at all of them and then, via my own decision, settled with one.

However, doing everything yourself does mean that you make mistakes and I certainly made a huge mistake with Instagram!

Instagram vs TikTok

I made a decision a while back to start by getting to grips with one social media platform before moving on to the next. I am hoping that what I learned within one would allow me to transfer the learning to the second. In a similar way the initial content I produced for one could be recycled!

**Side Note – I wish I had created a better file organisation so that I could easily find all my previous content!**

So I decided to go with Instagram first. I merrily set about creating some sort of plan to share content on the platform.

And that was the first mistake I made.

Instagram is not a sharing platform!

All my content is on different platforms, from Facebook to YouTube I thought I could use Instagram to share all my content. This would mean that there would be one place that I could direct people to for them to see what I was creating.

Now I have been sharing my content on Instagram for some time, actually from the start of this year! I have been creating the content and then organising posts to be shared on Instagram, thinking that everyone could engage with the posts and get directed to say YouTube or this blog. How wrong I was!

You will probably laugh about this. I have been adding links to my content since January but only realised last night that the links do not work in the description section of my posts. There is a ‘link’ sticker for stories but that is all. All the links I had added to this point were, well, useless! People could use them but you can’t even copy them from the post’s description!

You can, of course, link to sites in your profile. But this would just link to the global site. What this would mean would be that if you followed the link for this blog post it would come to the site, rather than this specific post.

Last night I felt rather stupid, to say the least!

Its own content!

I’m not giving up on Instagram! I have just realised that it is a platform that I need to make specific content for. Content like my quotes and selfie images are suitable for Instagram since there is no clicking away from the post to see the content.

What I have started to do is think about Instagram as a site that I need to create specific content for, that requires no ‘clicking away’ or can easily be linked-to in my bio. I have thought of reducing the sort of links I use and even using playlists on the link so that specific content can be located and then, hopefully, watched.

I am definitely learning through doing here. Without any qualifications for social media, this is a learning process. I can definitely see why people charge several hundreds of pounds to support creators or provide them with a course to follow!

Outro

That’s it really. My huge mistake with Instagram. But I have lived, explored and learned big time!

At this point, I would like to say that this was my final mistake. But this is a learning process and I am sure that I will definitely make even more mistakes in the future.

So be prepared to experience the learning process alongside me 😁😁

Thanks for reading

inwils