Avoid getting “Shadowbanned” by your Instagram audience.
Getting fewer likes and engagements on your Instagram post concerns you, as a business owner, about what you have done wrong.
“Did I use too many hashtags?”
“Did my post go out at the right time of the day?”
“Is my copy not engaging enough?”
“Did I lose engagement because I used #likesforlikes?”
I want you to understand the behavior of your audience on how they can control what appears on their feed, and how you can avoid getting “shadowbanned” by your followers.
1) “Close Friends” option on stories.
If you manage a personal account, you may choose to turn on this option as it allows you to share with only your close network. It will also prioritize these connections to appear on both feeds and stories.
Business owner action: Consistently post stories every day. There is no perfect timing or number of posts in publishing an Instagram story. However, you may pull up your analytics and check the top 5 “Time of the day” where your audience is active and use this as your guide. Then, every time you upload a story, you sit beside their “close friend” spot.
2) Mute an account.
Anyone could mute a page or a person if they decided not to hear from them. So your audience can follow you but can choose not to see anything that you are sharing — one reason to consider why engagements have been turning sour lately.
Business owner action: Ensure that you are showing values and importance to the content you are producing. It is not the number of posts that you are creating every day but the connection of your message to your audience. You can make ten posts a day with 30 hashtags but still get zero response. Always go back to your content pillars when making your Instagram post.
3) You don’t like what you are seeing? Mark it, “Not interested.”
Instagram makes sure that you stay on their platform for a long time by filtering the content going out to your feed. To help the algorithm learn your behavior, you can now mark the post “Not interested,” and Instagram will only show you things that will keep you browsing for hours.
Business owner action: On the Instagram platform, there are many ways to connect to your audience; there’s the Instagram feed, stories, IGTV, Reels, messaging, and explore page. Each feature gives you a way to “test” and understand your audience’s interest. By closely monitoring your metrics and regularly connecting to your followers, you will have a grasp of what your audience wants to consume from your brand. In this way, your posts won’t get marked as something that they are not interested in.
No one can predict the Instagram algorithm on what post will get viral and what will get “shadowbanned.” What’s important is that we use it for social interaction more than anything else. Yes, we need to make money and use these pages to sell, but the primary reason we used the Instagram platform is to connect and socialize. As soon as we bridge that gap, brand growth and sales will follow.
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Written by: IC Sarabia
