Instagram carousel posts get less reach through hashtags?

So, since I’m experiencing a worse post performance than two months ago, I tried to backtrack and find out if I did something differently in March that I stopped doing in April (when my reach and engagement rate suddenly dropped, probably due to an algorithm update) and that I could start doing again.

Thanks to my calendar, I noticed that I stopped posting carousel posts by the end of March, after posting at least one of them per day for two months.

Tried that again this week, and, well…

My posts usually receive about 80% of their views through hashtags, for the four carousel posts I posted this week it was 10-30% through hashtags, with about the same total number of followers seeing them.

All photos were the same quality as usual, similar to what I posted before, all photos in the carousel were related to each other and to the hashtags I used, and the hashtag sets I used on these posts perform well on other, similar photos.

The non-carousel posts performed as usual this week.

I didn’t really find something about this on here (at my level at least) apart from one a month old reply to a thread about shadow ban, so I didn’t really want to resuscitate that thread…

Anyone else experiencing this? Does someone have an explanation?
Not really expecting a solution, I just wanted to get some more eyes on that issue, in case others are having issues with abysmal reach.

I’m definitely stopping my carousel posts experiment now. :smile:

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Yes I notice a redution in the engagement with carousel posts, but to tell you the true im feeling that instagram is reducing the reach in all posts

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100%… They want ad money

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Oh, they definitely do, my overall reach is only half of what it was in March, and since the beginning of April only ~30% of my followers see my pictures.

I’m sure we all noticed that by now.

But still, carousels perform even worse than single photos, and so significantly so that I thought it would be interesting for others to know that this could be an issue so they can tweak something. :slightly_smiling_face:

I would love to see if someone did a rigorous testing of this. It doesn’t make sense to me that carousels would perform worse in hashtags. Instagram should favor carousels since they require people to spend more time swiping and looking over a single picture.

Well then, they better make their ad system worth paying for… I’m not payin 20$ for an ad in tyer 1 country to gain 2 Followers… It’s a disaster what FB is doing to Reach on Instagram. I am experiencing a reach drop on all my accounts for this month. Also carousel never worked for me in hashtags, they used to perform better for account’s own followers though, higher Reach, but this way bring less growth.

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Yeah, it sucks. Not only that, they punish people for trying to grow their accounts. Both manual and automation.

I got a carousel to work for me in hashtags today, but I hadn’t got hashtag reach in 2 weeks. But it’s hard to know if I would’ve gotten reach from a single pic during those 2 weeks

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That’s why I was so shocked to see that in my post insights. It doesn’t make any sense to me, especially since all photos in these carousels were a perfect fit for the hashtags I used.

Two months ago carousels were performing really good, now I feel like I wasted a handful of great photos that took a lot of effort to take and edit.

Everything else is about average though, my followers who actually saw them (same number as always lately) engaged with them quite well, the amount of likes isn’t too bad for a post with almost no hashtag reach and the comments are even a bit above average.

They should have performed well.

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If I had a dollar for every time I said the same thing to myself. It’s very frustrating

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Sad but true…

@cromatic it was your reply I found when I searched for this earlier today, I wasn’t aware carousels never worked for you though.

It would be fine if they performed better with my existing followers, that could’ve been something to do from time to time to kiss them awake, but as it is it’s just a bad joke.

Maybe it’s just a phase…

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IDK guys, I have a strong feeling that there are hard days to come for automation and daily actions we will be able to perform. The platform is now mature enough for them to go for a serious purge. I feel it, it’s in the air haha. Bring it on IG! They’ve already seem to have started with Reach decrease for everybody. Btw are all your pages Business pages? Maybe they’re doing Reach drop for all business pages. We need some more insights from people on this… anyone with a personal account?

I have a creator account. But according to reddit (I know, I know :sweat_smile:) personal accounts are also seeing a drop in engagement (which is really a drop in reach).

It’s a creator account, and I’ve never used automation on it. Not really spamming either, apart from liking people’s emoji-replies to my stories in one go.

Problem is that we wouldn’t be able to see the difference between follower reach and hashtag reach in a personal account.

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I used to get @ 50% Reach from own followers only with carousels, wile they’ve been doing extremely bad in hashtags they performed very well internaly for acc followers but i guess it’s niche related since i’m showing a small niche products and followers usually tend to go through the entire 7-10 carousel pictures to see the entire thing.

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True, only if you notice like / comment drops.

I think eventually everyone will have to pay for ads. Even to reach own followers

Just thinking of this is :exploding_head: at that point we will al have our accounts turned into personals lol, and upload a selfie every 4-th post to teach the algo we’re actually a person not a business. That’s insane…

when you use hashtags with carousels your reach goes down – it’s a bug in insta – don’t use hashtags and watch your reach go up. Been that way since February still not fixed.

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That’s good it’s not a shadowban, like I thought. I don’t know why I magically got reach today with a carousel, though :thinking:

if they had vids in them, the follower spends more time on them and insta likes that kinda stuff where they spend more time on a post. hence gets promoted more