Banned IG Hashtags, change in the algorithm?

Hi people,

For the first time ever this happened to one of my accounts yesterday…
I posted a picture with caption and hashtags at the normal time but after a few mins I noticed only a few likes, much less than usual, so I decided to check if it was showing up in those hashtags, and it wasn’t are all and for my surprise 3 of them were “banned” by the community…
Immediately I went to edit the post and remove the first hashtags, I was in a rush for other things so I didn’t delete the other 2, so finally, I edited the post 3 times! And here comes my shock…the post has now the highest impressions, reach and engagement of the history of the account, and double of the previous post.

I was told many times that we shouldn’t edit the posts so now I’m wondering was going on…

Any of you had a similar experience? did you see this before? Should we edit the posts or not?

Thanks community!! :grinning:

Cheers.

Are the additional impressions from hashtag and others or amongst your own followers?

@Cindy From hashtags, 72% weren’t following the account.
Impressions:
65% from hashtags
24% from Home and
1% from Profile.

Thanks for the info but it’s only one post so it could be lucky with hitting hashtags. A bit hard to draw any conclusions at the moment.

Could be luck…but I’m not concerned about that, I was looking for similar experiences, if we follow what ppl is saying per years we shouldn’t edit the posts, and now after the editing it ranked super well.
I don’t get it yet :wink:

I imagine that when a picture is edited, an algorithm in the background checks if the new caption is significality different in form and context from the previous one and then decides if it throttles reach/impressions.

Facebook announced a while back that it will cut down on reach for content with clickbait captions. So they need to figure out context of caption somehow.

Example:

“When this post reaches 1000 likes I’ll donate my dog to this charity”

Post reaches 900 likes, Caption is changed.

“Every like is one cat.”

Do you get what I mean? I’m not sure if this is true but I assume it’s a counter measure implemented by IG.

If you just want to get rid of typos and or formulate the message in caption a little without changing it’s meaning then there’s no reason to cut down on reach. :slight_smile:

Not everything you heard from other experience is a fact for you too, you have to test it yourself with your setting accounts type niche and all the other variable to see if it works for you or not!!

Never be afraid of testing, you will be amazed how you will grow faster and learn new things that no one did before!!

I totally I agree, I’m a software engineer so I know this pretty well… I was looking for opinions if your prefer. In order to narrow down my research and reverser engineering. Cheers!