In the last month, a huge ruckus has erupted over in Instagram land. Shadow banning, bot services and the closing down (finally) of the most visible culprit – the Instagress bot service has caused quite a bit of angst and upheaval in various facebook groups and the instagram community more broadly.
For those of you not aware, a shadow ban is typically something applied to a spammer inside their social media account. To the spammer, they believe that they are using their account as normal and it all seems normal to them – however none of their posts are being seen by anyone, other than those people that already are following them. It was first coined inside Reddit as it was applied to spammy reddit users ( one could say all of them are a bit spammy!) and very recently it has been applied to Instagram.
A shadow ban inside Instagram means that to you, your posts will be showing up in hashtag streams as normal, you may even be appearing in the top 9, however to anyone who does not follow you, they will not see your post. As tagging your posts with appropriate hashtags is one of the key ways to be found by new people inside Instagram, this is a significant problem. If you have been shadowbanned, it will mean that no new people will see you, and potentially not many of your followers will either.
Instagram however, does not directly confirm or deny this, but references people to read Instagram’s terms of service instead. Essentially Instagram is flexing its muscles in relation to the growth in Instagram bot services that automate the process of liking posts, leaving comments and following accounts on your behalf. Yes that is where all those “Best one yet” and “your feed is great, DM me to collab” are coming from. When you set up one of these automation services they typically ask you to specify the hashtags you wish to use and the instagram accounts that you want to target (this is so that they can target the followers of those Instagram accounts for you).
Instagram strictly forbids the use of any third party tool to engage inside the Instagram APP on your behalf. This has actually always been Instagram’s policy, but it would seem that recently they are only now starting to take active steps to lock these kind of services out of their ecosystem and to take action against users who are using their services. This means that if you are using an automation service of any kind, you could be banned from Instagram.
Twitter has been rife with automation tools like these for years. People may accept that of twitter more readily, as it is seen as more of a fast paced news service, we don’t really build relationships with people there ( well yes you can, but more in the good old days of twitter!).
All of us want social media growth and automating the process of how we achieve this growth might seem a smart move. Especially when we specifically advise the right kind of hashtags and the right kind of influencer that we wish to target. This is because we are taught (and rightly so because it works) that engagement with our target audience inside Instagram is how you grow your account.
Using the hashtags of my target customers, I can like images of my target customers,comment on their posts and follow some of these accounts. All designed to put my account and business in front of them. It is a known method to build your audience.
But this can take a lot of time to do. Hours of time and we often just don’t have the capacity or simply don’t want to spend hours each day & night (which many early Instagram adopters did) liking, commenting and following the right kind of people inside Instagram. It makes sense then that many people are seeking to automate this process, to fast track growth and to spend their valuable time elsewhere.
It sounds like a great plan.
But what tends to happen, is that as more people get on board the automation train as we have seen, we end up with a just a bunch of bots doing all the engagement with each other.
It’s AI done all wrong.
It’s just not authentic – to use a seriously overused word inside Social Media and particularly Instagram.
Instagram is an area that has become very full of people claiming to be authentic, yet serve up heavily curated and crafted feeds that are not actually tied to their actual reality. Not to mention a heavy dose of Instagram bots helping build those massive follower counts.
So what kind of automation can be used safely inside Instagram to avoid being shadowbanned as well as how we can build up a following that actually values what we say?
- Use a scheduling tool like Later or Planoly to plan your posts.
- Use an analytics tool like Iconosquare to identify the best time to post, those posts that your audience responds to the best.
- Try this new tool SMAudience to start to track what hashtags are working best for you and your competitors.
- Create a series of hashtag banks that you can swap out and use to best suit your posts ( too many of the same hashtags over and over without thinking can flag to Instagram that you are becoming a bit spammy).
And remember, don’t use ANY third party tool to like or comment or following anyone, ever. Your Instagram audience can be one of your most loyal, most engaged and most receptive to your message, treat them with respect and trust in your message.
