Was wondering if it’s just me or everyone’s experiencing some drop in post engagement?
Some 7-8 days ago I used to get b/w 500-700 likes per post, sometimes even reaching as high as 1500-2000 likes (my account back then was around 3700 followers).
Now my account has grown to 4.3k followers but my last 3-4 posts hardly reach 400 likes.
Is it possible that IG somehow limits reach/visibility for specific posts/accounts? Initially I thought that my account could have been shadowbanned but I’ve double checked and that’s not the case. What I did a few days ago was to delete 3 of my recent posts (due to low engagement) and meanwhile IG has limited my account for 24 hrs (I assume due to lots of unfollows I did). Is it possible that these circumstances could have caused it?
They do not announce usually no, but they mentioned that they rolled out new machine learning and there was a huge update August 26th. So there’s that.
The same happens to me. As an example:
1 account with 14K was getting around 1300 likes per post and now it almost does not cross the 60o likes…no shadowban, and as @wortime says, really old posts are appearing in the feed with no apparent reason/connection
I hope this is not going to be the go-forward state of IG and it’s rather something temporary. In any case obviously it’s not just me, that ain’t good…
Wow machine learning… you guys should learn about AI and machine learning. Most likely in the near future or even now, the one who bans your accounts is not human, but rather an AI
Thank you so much for this! With just 76 posts and 800 followers (gaining about 100 per week), we consistently received at least 100 likes or more per post. As of September 10th, we have tanked with our current post receiving just 30 likes in almost 24 hours. I’ve checked for a shadowban and disconnected all apps from the account.
I have also noticed that as of yesterday, older posts are indeed receiving unusual attention/likes in a different pattern than the past.
Most concerning is that our Reach went from around 500 to 800 ish to 250 on our most recent post, 279 on the one before. We cannot figure out what is going on.
We use 30 hashtags and switch them up corresponding to content.
We do not follow/unfollow but did have more follows than followers and as of two weeks ago went through and unfollowed anyone not following us back. So, we currently have 874 followers and are following 125. We are new and trying to just grown organically. Anyway, it’s really disheartening.
Has anyone found that things turn around when stuff like this happens? Anything we can do on our end to fix the engagement and impressions/reach issue?
My posts have been tanking as well, I am in the food niche and have 8.3k followers. My posts used to get 600-700 likes and I am currently getting only around 350 likes the last two weeks. I have seen in other forums that other users across all niches have been experiencing an engagement drop. It is absolutely discouraging, but it means we should change our strategies.
I switched to a business profile today to see if that would help. I will report back.
Some people have stated that switching to business profile have cause a drop of the engagement. Why? Theory is that IG sees your acc. then as potential client (also known as “melking cow” ) - meaning: they think you wanna make money with it, so they force you to buy ads on IG.
Have you already changed to business and how is the experience so far?
Some people are assuming that this MAY help: checking the followers and blocking followers who a) have only a few pictures, b)didnt post in the last X days (maybe 30 days?!) and c) have a weird follower-followings-ratio (e.g. sometimes you see people who have 5 followers and are following 500 or 5,000 or more acc.s) engaging more with your followers . Meaning: liking & commenting on their pics and replying to the comments that they did on your pics. Why? This will bring them back to your account. It seems like the IG algorithm is evaluating each account. If you have many followers who havent engage with your acc. for a while, this means who have a lot of ghost followers and this is not good. Algorithm may think your content is not good (any more), so it might lower your reach…
What is really astonishing, btw: most influencers have a really bad ER. Look at this influencer. She has now 89K followers, but is getting on most of her pics around 1,000 - 2,000 likes (meaning her engagement rate is around 1.5-2%):
Even though, she is gaining on some days 100 or more followers - even though she is hardly using hashtags (!):
Hi there. Before the engagement drop I was averaging 700 likes with an account with 8k followers. Then, my likes dropped to 400. I switched to a business account and my last post reached 1000 likes. So far it has worked for me, I also enjoy the access to analytics.
Moreover, I started a like + save group chat. Where we send our posts and everyone has to like and hit the “save” button. I believe it might be working.
ditto
Since September my engagement has fallen off a cliff from 2.5% and above, to now where I’m struggling to get 1%
It seemed to happen around the time of the massive IG hack, and I guessed it was just a lot of bot accounts being deactivated maybe? I didn’t realise IG did another massive update in late August though, so who knows. Maybe low engagement is just the new Black for the next year or so?
Tired of Facebook, Instagram and anything related with them…
checking the followers and 
