Engagement keeps dropping lately

Bots had an important role on engagement :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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If unproperly targetted and engaging with them. I’ve never had bot activity likin my photos. At least small enough to not notice it. So i guess that on the people wrongly targetting their accounts.

Or being dependent on like exchange or services like that. True genuine engagement rarely drops as hard as 75%

I have a personal account over 100K that was rarely affected by any of IG updates over the last couple years.

But after June 4, and even letting it completely rest for a month (I kept posting the same kind of content) the engagement dropped by 40%

Likes were averaging 4000+ for a 130K prior to June 4. Now the posts are just hitting 2500 likes, One post was even 2000.

On the contrary I see some accounts who seem not to be botting unaffected. Or is that just me?

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If your IG account isnt building some sort of loyal fanbase or community it’s to be expected. Bots search with certain targets. They even engage with the hashtags you use. So while one post might make you go viral you’re not actually building some audience that keeps them engaging with you. Thats most peoples problems with engagement drops i think. So with sooo many bots being affected, you notice that all of a sudden your depending on your ‘loyal’ followers and hashtags dont seem to work anymore (cause botters) dont interact with them anymore

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Also, it is through us that there is a decrease in commitment: D
Because bots no longer like other photos, even those who do not use the bot :slight_smile: So the number of shares has decreased.
What also contributed to the reduction of the receipts, organic (natural) accounts

It’s all due to Instagram changing the way people’s posts are seen on the app. It’s continually being refined into a more personal display. People will only be shown posts which Instagram thinks they are truly interested in, based on how they use the app. Even hashtag results are personalized for the past year or so.

This post from an old Reddit thread sums it up nicely:

Instagram is very smart. People are complaining about reduced reach consistently and Instagram can honestly respond saying that they are not reducing organic reach. They genuinely flat-out deny it. What they’re really doing is refining it, to the point where every move you make on their app effects what is shown to you. It just so happens that a side effect of this is significantly reduced organic reach (and higher ad spend required to compensate). How in(convenient for them).

I talk more about how you can improve your reach organically here:

The margins to bend their algorithm to our will are ever thinning. Either you play by their rules or you don’t play at all.

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True. However 4k likes with 130k followers is already on the low side. So there more than just IG’s algo

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Let’s not forget where the majority of hashtag likes came from. We’ve all been suffering since the update(s) and thousands of platforms around the world using automation are also experiencing the same difficulties. I’m sure once we all find our feet things will naturally pick up again, but it won’t be too significant a change. I’m honestly happier getting less likes if a higher percentage of them are truly a reflection of interest. If I’m going to receive automated likes, I’d like them from high-quality accounts that at least seem legitimate, ideally to the point where I can’t even tell the difference.

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Yes, I confirm that. I already wrote that yesterday in a comment. I have a small account and posting great photos. People used to engage with my photos highly without any effort. I had no idea 2-3 months ago what powerlikes and engagement groups were!!

I read some comments saying that a lot of automation was used and now the ER drop is obvious or that the content is not good enough. No, its not always like that guys. I tend to agree with @Alexnvo that instagram has its ups and downs regarding ER, I can’t explain that otherwise. And I hope that it is so, because for my account with the small number of followers one sees directly decrease in likes and reach and assumes that likes were always bought, this is so unfair and such a conclusion hurts my account.

Instagram is not very good in detecting good content after all…

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I can attest to this. I have been checking a lot of my client accounts and their engagement rates have been dropping recently. Do you guys feel like it’s because IG knows we’re using automation and because of this, they are reducing our client content outreach?

It’s not always just content only. More important is niching it down as much as you can. If you have a meme account for example. You can have all kinds of memes, all kinds of humor. In that case for example you should niche down to 1 kind of meme humor or something. Same goes for everything. While i love comedy, i dont like all comedians or all kinds of comedy. So it’s content for sure but also a niched down type of content. At least for me. IG having ups and downs i can agree with SLIGHTLY. But drops of 75% is not IG. But thats my opinion and from my observation and results

It’s a cold feed soon to get better I hope

Explore has more power and when it’s not working the entire ig spectrum is hit

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I have 3 accounts 15k that does 4k to 25k in likes regularly and last week or so barely passes 700 likes a post. When they rise … Each one by one I know then the feed is normal again … They are slightly getting higher the past 3 days

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So basically you’re dependent on explore page likes and bot likes (that target your tags) mostly?

No bot likes … Follower ER excellent.

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Seems so odd to me that IG would all of a sudden divide your ER likes by 5 and more. Never had such drop. Would it be that IG thinks you’re not niched down enough? That they have a hard time trying to figure out what your followers are most interested in? Considering they keep updating and ‘upgrading’ the algo of what followers want to see most.

Many times it happened

It’s happened to my personal photography page, normally would hit ~450 likes per photo average for a 5k account. It hasn’t been able to break ~250 in a month or more. Not incredible ER, but about on par for the type of page.

Recently though, it’s been struggling to break 200 mark after 2 days. ER is becoming absolutely garbage. Never used fake likes or engagement groups, and my content has (in my opinion) gotten much better, so content is only part of the equation when you get hidden by the algorithm.

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I checked the engagement on my accounts from the last year and I had exactly the same low or even lower engagement in June/ July 2018 and it went back up on the next months x7 or in some cases x30.
There are still great engagement hacks for posts and reach, but I’m not sure if sharing them here isn’t like pointing out to instagram what they should work on, so we can pay/ finally give them all our net profit. If I were an Instagram dev responsible for reducing automation I would be checking this forum daily and adjusting to every fix we come up to. Easy.

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