How you can be avoid getting shadow banned from Instagram or blocked.

So firstly there are about 877 million active users on Instagram. So it certainly is a platform that we need to put some of our energy into if our audience is on that platform.

Shadowbanned basically means that Instagram is hiding your content. So you could be posting and wondering why your engagement’s down, but really Instagram is not letting the audience see your post.

So to avoid using banned hashtags, firstly you need to check them, how do you do that?

If you go into Instagram and search a hashtag and you click on the content you’ll notice it won’t actually let you open it if it is against community standards. You then know that that one’s blocked. However, sometimes if you alter the hashtag slightly for example: add an “s” or use an emoji, it may accept the alternative.

Some of the reasons that your account may be blocked or banned are: if you’re sharing photos or videos that you yourself have not taken, so it’s not your content and you don’t have the right to share it, nudity, repeatedly privately messaging people, using bots to like, comment, follow and share, hate crimes, sell sex services, firearms or drugs, if you show any disrespect threats or degrading content or if you are glorifying self-inflicted injuries or graphic media without warning that the content is going to be graphic.

Next thing is to avoid being blocked or shadowbanned. Make sure that you’re using about 10 hashtags and they always need to be different and in a different order including some branded hashtags. How you come up with a branded hashtag is you go into google and you search that hashtag across Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, etc and you find one that is relevant to you. Find one that is not widely used by anyone else and that would become your own branded hashtag.

Also, make sure that you don’t use pods for engagement as Instagram can now pick up pods. Like when people all jump in and they try and support each other if they pick up that that’s happening they’ll shadowban you. Or, if you’re using bots to do it on your behalf they consider it as spam and they’ll shadow ban.

Then in the event that you feel that Instagram is shadow banning or blocking you and you’re not sure why you can also contact Instagram and ask them.

What’s the best way to grow Instagram?

Basically grow it organically and that is about having a strategy for growth and building meaningful and genuine relationships. And that the content that you share is relevant to your audience and that you don’t spam. 

Here are some of the tips for organic growth on Instagram:

Firstly don’t buy followers focus on genuine, meaningful and  authentic growth

Secondly, always create engaging content and remember that Instagram is a visual platform. You’ve got to make sure that the visuals you use are decent and are themed. Also keep your content short, sweet, and simple, and use captions as a headline for your posts.

Thirdly you want to make sure that you’re developing a strong branding online presence along with solid key messaging that’s consistent. So your colours, your tones and your themes are all consistent across all platforms.

Fourth is consistency so rather than post terrible content every single day it’d be better for you to be consistent and rather take the time to put meaningful and good content on.

Fifth is competitor’s analysis, go and stalk your competitors. Ask yourself, when are they doing it? What are they doing? How are they doing it? What’s your point of difference and what can you do better to stand out above them?  

Lastly, you want to grow your profile to reach a wider audience. So you want to engage in other people’s feeds, you want to make sure that you respond to comments, you want to mention or @ people in your content. Do joint ventures, giveaways, re-share stories, and even have countdowns because FOMO is quite relevant on Instagram like every platform.  

When it comes to using hashtags balance your reach by using wildly popular hashtags, medium popular hashtags, and scarce ones, to reach all areas of Instagram.