Instagram boosted posts and limited reach

Hey guys, I’ve got a interesting case study for you. Few weeks ago I signed a pretty good client. He was at 110k followers at that time not knowing how to grow effectively anymore. He was running the account all by himself for the last 3 years and the main method of growth was boosting posts and getting his content shared by bigger accounts - he is in a tattoo niche so that’s quite a shareable niche. His biggest concern was really bad ER and poor organic growth, he didn’t grow a single follower without boosting his posts. So we created a badass story ad, split tested the creative and audiences, and finally we are able to grow consistently by 200-350 followers a day with $10/day budget without India, Africa, South America, and Indonesia’s traffic. The only problem is his organic reach. Instagram got so greedy of him that it does no longer show his content on the explore nor hashtags. He’s got good initial engagement coming from Home and Profile, enough to get onto bigger hashtags and the content itself is dope as f*ck so that’s pretty obvious that IG is limiting the reach on purpose. I’ve been trying to fight it off, being super active on telegram PODs, buying some powerlikes and powersaves, and we’ve been able to get to explore every third post or so but it happens only after a few days. Like yesterday’s post, we got 3.6k likes in 13 hours, 2k saves and 400 shares. One might think it’s more than enough to show up on hashtags and explore, yet our reach was 24k of which 23.5k came from home and 500 from other (telegram rounds). Now on the contrary I have a few personal accounts in different niches, one being a woman meme page. If I ever get such engagement in that short amount of time, post is going crazy viral, reaching up to few thousand people and getting like 500-1000 followers per post. Do you know how can I recover from that limited reach? I’ve been looking for a working solution for days now and nothing seems to work.

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Damn instagram these greedy shts. Limiting organic reach after ads is such a shity move.
Me and some others had similar experiences writing about this.

I have done this on my main account about a year ago without knowing of the reach lowering effect and grew pretty well but soon noticed that I wasn’t growing orgsnically no more.

For me it took some time not doing any ads, boosting my posts with powerlikes to get suggested to more and more people and organically growing my account to get it back to normal but I still don’t know if it is 100% back to normal again.

Also switching back to a personal profile might help reset this after a while. See here:

Also @embraceone and me have had Threads on this exact issue, maybe you can find something of value:

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Thanks a lot! Appreciate the feedback, I’ll look through the topics :slight_smile: If I find any solution I’ll be sure to notify

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I would focus a bit or research on the actual 9 posts in explore, I would compare them with mine, if you don’t check you don’t know how well they are doing, maybe they have a huge engagement. Also I would research hashtags, IG after a while will decrease your exposure if you are always reaching the top 9, it does it to diversify the content, if not, a huge account would be always first…for ever.

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