I’m a pet comic artist on Instagram, but my posts barely reach any new, non-following people. I have a “fan base” with around 25k and a pretty decent engagement rate (only when Instagram shows to ppl) although I’ve paid for the majority of these people (Instagram shoutouts on other comic pages).
I believe my account was flagged a while ago. 2 years ago (when I had around 3k followers) I used an engagement bot, that might pulled the trigger. However, I haven’t used any bots or blackhat stuff since then.
Only thing I’d need is to unflag my account if thats possible. Obviously not for free
Your account might be “damaged” in some way, but it certainly isn’t a flag that could be put on and off to an account. Also, it is impossible to get a representative from Facebook, they don’t have the traditional customer service, nor a direct way to reach them. You can appeal, but only for visible flags on account, such as a ban.
As far as for third-party services, whoever claims that they can help you “unflag” your account is just messing up with you, as noone can do that, as it isn’t something that truely exists.
Try different things with the account and see what works. I am pretty sure this is a flaw in your methods, not a punishment from the Instagram gods
remove all third part apps.
post regular – do nothing else – watch stories if you get bored of followers,
and wait – yep wait.
for the shadow ban to lift, you should be okay. you will lose followers but thats nornal. see it is not the follower loss you should worry about, it’s the life of the account. after some time - month or so, you should be back to normal.
Thank you all for your replies! The thing is, that I don’t have/didn’t add any 3rd party apps for at least 1 year now… Even manually deleted 1-2k ghost followers myself during the months because I was scared of any apps to screw up my account more
Definitely change your password. I had a client who claimed they had used 3rd party tools in the past but were no longer using them.
They were right - the tools they had used were no longer active, BUT their account was doing a lot of liking everyday that was not them! I believe their credentials had been passed (sold!) on by the tool they were originally using to other tools / SMM panels or whatever.
For months before I took over their account the account had been used for botted activity that they simply weren’t aware of.
Got them to change the password and of course all such activity stopped.
So, change the password, even if you don’t think any 3rd party services / apps are using your account - they may be!
So I switched back to Personal and changed password a few days ago and my engagement didn’t change, even dropped a bit. I’m gonna wait for a month or two, see how it goes and report back! Thank you all for your replies!
3 weeks past, my engagement is getting worse and worse… literally getting 50-100 reach from hashtags and 10-30 from explore per post. Just to compare, a year ago when I had 15k followers my posts received around 5k likes each, now I have 25k followers and I’m getting 2k likes per post.
Maybe I’m gonna swich to Youtube and make animations, but that’s like 10 times more work and not sure if I’ll be able to transfer my followers to YT
Those accounts with extremely low engagement rate are mostly loaded with fake followers I suppose… However I compare mine to other comic accounts and almost all of them got some kind of “boost” from Instagram till they reached 40-60k in a few weeks, then it stopped for them as well. IDK, really
You can either try to grow it with automation/IG ads
Or I honestly recommend starting a new account and transferring all the active people onto the new one lots more potential if you’ve had a plateau with your current one
