Have your reach and engagement dropped sharply? It is possible that you have been shadowbanned – a restriction from Instagram that is imposed on dishonest users.
How can you recognize a shadow ban?
There are several reasons for this:
✔️Abuse of automatic posting or automatic boosting.
✔️Exceeding the daily limit to exclude suspicious activity – no more than 300 subscriptions and 300 likes per day..
✔️Excessive passion for contests, puzzles, or participation in giveaways.
✔️Using prohibited promotion methods: boosting bots, spam, or publishing controversial content.
✔️Mass unsubscribes: if an account is not interesting to the audience, then it should not be shown.
✔️Incorrect use of hashtags.
The most unpleasant thing about such a ban is that you may not even notice it at first because you still use all the functionality of the social media, but these actions are not visible to subscribers, and you can suspect something is wrong only by the decrease in likes and comments.
How can you get out of the shadow ban?
You can’t lift the ban, you can only reduce the duration, and usually it lasts from 2 to 14 days, sometimes longer. In order to reduce this time as much as possible, you need to take a number of actions.
✔️Do not show any activity on Instagram for 2 to 3 days.
✔️Make the first three posts after the inactivity without hashtags and geotags.
✔️Do not use proxies and VPN services, and disable automatic services.
✔️Make changes to your account header, remove hashtags from recent posts.
✔️Remove all bots and unsubscribe people who are not interested in your content.
✔️Enable two-factor authentication of your account.
After coming out of the shadow, you need to return the subscribers’ interest with quality content – diversify the feed, post photos and videos, animations, and polls. Make posts when they will get the maximum level of engagement, and do not forget about targeted advertising and other sources of traffic with good organic coverage.
And not to let the situation happen again, never use spam promotion methods, rather contact SMM professionals.