An Instagram caption lends itself to heavy emoji usage and loads of information.
On Pinterest, the typical user looks for and pins practical, useful, beautiful and inspirational content to digital versions of the cork board you used to have hanging somewhere within reach of your desk. In the days of actual magazines and print publications, you would cut or tear out bits of timeless and useful information for reference: recipes, instructions and style and decor tips. This is why Dove’s “Beautiful Balance” board contains step-driven tips and useful information that don’t explicitly sell deodorant but rather – you guessed it – promote ways to build self-esteem, particularly among teenage girls.
If you want to spread your influencer business across a variety of platforms, you need to be clear on the differences. Even when it is the very same user that follows you on all these different platforms, you need to understand that people open different apps for different reasons, so you must ensure that you are always packaging the kind of content they have come to look for.
As Wian says:
No one opens TikTok to see Instagram-type stuff. They would’ve opened Instagram if they wanted to see their friends, family or celebs they love. But on TikTok, it doesn’t matter who made the video, it just has to be good. On TikTok people can also scroll past within seconds, so you have to captivate them from the first second and because the sound is always up, right from the start your video also needs to be made differently.
No logo is visible on the Instagram images, yet on Pinterest it is a subtle footnote.
I asked Wian to list the top three mistakes most people make on TikTok:
• People don’t start strong enough. A video that did really well for me on TikTok fell flat on Instagram because there, many people watch the start of a video with the sound off and then only push up the sound a few seconds in. I think many people have good videos but because it doesn’t start well, people scroll past it on TikTok. Videos need to be short, simple and you cannot waste a single second; on TikTok it needs to be interesting all the way through.
• People don’t post often enough; they are too worried about quality and then not delivering enough quantity.
• Make content for TikTok specifically and if you don’t know where to start, watch loads of TikTok videos. How did you learn what worked on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter? You spent a lot of time there.
Hashtags
Fun fact: The father of the hashtag didn’t work for Twitter.
Many people achieve exactly the opposite of what they intend with hashtags: you can tell by just looking at how they use them. Yes, the inclusion of hashtags will result in more people who don’t already follow you seeing your posts. It could even deliver you some new followers. However, if you are just including irrelevant hashtags, thinking that this is a shortcut to gaining more followers, you will irritate the ones you already have and no new follower will gain value from what you’re putting out there. As with anything on social media, if you are unsure, stay out of it or educate yourself quickly.
This was the first-ever use of the hashtag as we know it today. Chris Messina was a tech product designer in Silicon Valley in 2007. He was also part of the early wave of Twitter users who were trying to figure out how best to use the platform. Barcamp is a tech or web conference and Messina wanted to figure out how to organise the chatter about this event in a way that would be easy to access, both for him and the network of developers who were interested in it.
The use of hashtags really took off during a large-scale fire in San Diego County later that year, when Twitter users organically started using #sandiegofire to track updates. However, Twitter itself didn’t want to adopt and promote the practice until two years later, in 2009. Hashtags have since been called “wormholes” or even the “veins” of the Internet. Eventually hashtags became commonplace on all social media platforms, to the extent that Instagram limits the number you may include in a caption to 30.
I absolutely cannot stand hashtags that shamelessly ask for likes and followers, such as #followme, #like4like, #follow4follow and #tagsforlikes. This is a pointless waste of characters that gives your followers the worst impression: that you are cool with spam, with bots and sneaky shortcuts. Real success on social media is about finding ways to create engaging content that elicits honest responses and trust.
As you can see in the Dove example, brands know better than to use a raft of hashtags at the start of a post and as a user you would do well to take your cue from them – after all, they have employed specialists to devise their strategy on this front.
Hashtags are not meant to be read, so think of them rather as little flags or signals you plant so that those who are interested in a particular topic can find relevant content. Use them for what they are worth by seamlessly integrating them in a simple caption (this is risky if not done well) or safely concentrate them at the end, spaced well clear of your precious, carefully crafted message.
I follow a few hashtags on Instagram; one example is #bonsai. This means that content from people I don’t follow, but who are posting bonsai content, such as instruction videos on how to care for your bonsai or merely stills showing off beautiful bonsai trees, automatically pops up in my
