Hello everyone! Since a couple of users asked me questions about how I improved what supposedly is my “trust score” on Instagram I decided to elaborate on what has been my journey up to now. I’m not a native English speaker, so bear with me if something isn’t clear – I’ll be reading comments if you have any questions.
Intro
First of all – I opened my very first instagram account in October (fine wines niche), did PV, linked to my Facebook account and all that but didn’t start doing activity before 03/11. At the time I knew nothing about MPsocial, automation, BH/WH techniques, Instagram marketing. Nothing.
I started by transitioning what I’ve been posting on Vivino (where I have a small but high quality audience) and following same-niche accounts, but quickly realized my content was boring, despite being original and high quality.
So I started reading about Instagram growth methods, and stumbled upon F/U. Which I did massively, following 500+ people per day. ER was great (around 25-30%, with relatively big hashtag reach), and I was getting 180 story views with 350 followers.
The block
I ended up getting a 7-days hard block few days later, which was definitely discouraging, but at the same time it gave me space to find quality resources about instagram growth. That’s where MPsocial comes in. I spent a lot of time digging through old threads, and absorbing as much knowledge as I can.
After the block I knew I had to resuscitate the account (which was sitting at 500 or so followers, back then). First posts were a disaster. ER was halved, SV were more than halved, external reach (non-followers) was 1-2%.
How I played around it
First of all, I literally stopped every F/U and spammy action. No exceptions here, you need to get clean in order to recoover.
Most of the people on mpsocial agreed upon the fact that good ER is a solution to low “trust score” (or whatever you wanna call it), so I decided that was my priority.
I used Ads (abusing the pause feature to spend little to no money and work around “hot” hours) to promote every single post that didn’t get enough traction, until it got to a point where the number of likes/comments met my criteria (at least 20% of my follower base). To achieve that I set a 5€/day budget which I paused during rest and work hours.
Another thing I did was promoting my posts (1€ 1 day) as soon as I posted them. That way I forced instagram to expose my contents, even if I was “shadowbanned”.
I ended up spending €8 on Ads, total, to achieve a satisfactory engagement rate.
Part of my time during the block was spent looking for viral content in my niche. Three days after the block was over I posted something that was relatively new within my niche, during peak hours on Sunday, promoted with 1 euro as always. Basic hashtags, nothing over 500k. Well the post skyrocketed, giving me a reach of 14k with only 800 followers. Almost 600 likes! Hooray.
After that post went viral my hashtag reach was doing good. Still not like the pre-block times, but good. My posts were visible on recent from non-followers, I was getting hashtag reach. All in all, I was on my way to “restoration”.
I also worked on the sense of community, tried to create connections and friends. Started a laser-focused engagement group with other fifteen (and growing) other 1k-10k accounts where we all know each other and actively work on collaborations. Mutual shoutouts. Comparative wine tastings. You need a bit of creativity here!
The focused engagement group helped me getting even more hashtag reach. My last 6 posts, of which only one is “fun” and “viral”, are averaging really good numbers (engagement rate on those is around 27%). Posts that I never believed in (very technical, not something a lot of people can enjoy) ended up on Explore.
Summary
I was able to get 1.1k followers in my very first month of Instagram, learning from scratch and getting a hard block that I managed to work around. I guess you can say I “restored” this account by using a couple of tricks that ended up working.
Would you be interested in my repost routine to modify pictures’ EXIF/MD5 data? If so let me know in the comments and drop a like!
Thank you for this wonderful community.
Edit: Some of my posts data. I attached both viral and normal posts to see what it looks like using this method.
Edit: My followers/engagement rate stats. You can see the numbers rise right after the hard block.
If its to complicated it is enough to tell how the number from hashtags and startpage was.
