3 Small Bookstagram Mistakes You’re Making

For the most part, there’s no wrong way to bookstagram. If you’re having fun with it & posting about books, you’re doing it right.

Instead, these are more like small things that are hurting you more than they’re helping you. Thankfully, they’re quick and easy fixes if you choose to do it.

Joining ALL the Engagement Groups

Whatever IG has done this last year has really, really put everyone’s engagement numbers down the toilet. 2 years ago with a LOT less followers I was routinely getting 150+ likes on photos. Now I’m lucky to get more than 90 on my pics if I’m not in an engagement group.

I’ve done engagement groups on and off over the last year or so. They did help my account grow and give my photos a boost. I’m not going to tell you to avoid engagement groups. I’m telling you to LIMIT yourself to 1-3 groups.

There’s no definitive proof but I’ve seen several of my bookstagram friends being constantly thrown in “Instagram Jail.” The punishment of Instagram Jail varies but you usually see: not being able to post captions on your pictures, not being able to like pictures, not being able to comment, not being able to post anything besides stories. They vary in length from a day to upwards of a week.

The common thing among these accounts? MULTIPLE (5+) engagement groups. The extreme amount of liking you have to do to stay caught up sets off a red flag for IG’s system because technically it is gaming the system. There’s even a chance you may lose your account.

Theme Dividers

For some reason, bookstagram really seems to love theme dividers. Unfortunately, they do tend to hurt your account.

You’re posting THREE pictures in a row that your followers don’t like or care about. They won’t like or engage with it. [Plus it just spams their feed with ‘weird’ photos that they have zero interest in.] That’s telling the powers that be on IG’s end that your followers aren’t liking your pictures therefore they ‘deprioritize’ showing your pictures in your followers’ feeds.

Now you need to work even harder to get your followers to engage with your account to get yourself back to where you were.

Consider instead just posting 3 photos of your new feed (maybe a little more quickly than you normally post). Now you have 3 photos of your new theme to act as a divider. People are smart enough to see this as a new theme. You don’t need to tell them there’s a new theme.

Fancy Text In Your Captions

You 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 it's 𝒸𝓊𝓉ℯ to 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 your tweets and usernames 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖜𝖆𝖞. But have you 𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 to what it 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 with assistive technologies like 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓞𝓿𝓮𝓻? pic.twitter.com/CywCf1b3Lm

— Kent C. Dodds (@kentcdodds) January 9, 2019

Plus even people like me who don’t have vision problems have a hard time reading captions with fancy fonts.

Guess what? If I can’t read your captions on a regular basis, I’m probably going to unfollow you.

Truthfully, this is just the bare minimum you should do for accessibility. Other things to consider: Alt text and Captions for Instagram stories. [Do you have an app to recommend for this?]

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Do you have a small piece of bookstagram advice to share?
Drop it in the comments!

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