My 7 Day Hard Block Just Got Lifted: Need Advice!

Hi guys, today my 7 day hard block finally got lifted, and I would GREATLY appreciate if a kind soul would help me figure out the next steps in order to keep my account growing steady and safely. Heres a summary of my story:

  1. I’ve been using Instagram for years as a regular user on my main personal account. Last year (april 2019) I decided to open a new account to focus on my hobbies (collectibles and geek culture in general). My content is great (if I do say so myself, lol), heavily curated pictures and video I’ve created.

  2. On this new account I recently decided to start trying a 100% manual simple strategy to gain followers (I started doing this in July). I picked two or three several accounts with followers to which my content would be appealing and started liking the first picture of every open profile I found on said lists.

  3. Being the total noob I am, I had no idea Instagram had limits and of course ended up overdoing the whole like strategy (I probably went over 1000 likes on a single day, for several days straight).

  4. Everything was going great and I started gaining a lot of followers quickly, but eventually got my first soft ban (blocked likes) for 24 hours or so.

  5. I decided to investigate and read about Instagram limits and their war against bots, so I toned down my likes and kept a tab of how many I did a day, but I still got like 3 more temporary blocks before the big 7 day ban happened.

  6. The 7 day block happened on a day I decided to switch to my personal Instagram account (the super old one that has grown 100% organically) and started using the like strategy for the first time on that account as well. Then I switched to my newer account and kept liking (thinking the limits were calculated per account, and not per IP), and then got the hard block on this newer account.

  7. For all this I used my home wifi, now I know better.

  8. During my 7 day block I used ads for one of my posts (with the “automatic” audience option because for some reason Instagram wouldn’t let me select the personalized one). Around US$ 4 per day for 7 days. I’m not sure but I hope using ads helped my account better its trust ratio. During this week I did get the “About This Account” option that shows “information for accounts that reach a lot of people or advertise on Instagram. People can see this by taping on the … on your profile…”. Hopefully that’s good news.

  9. Today my block got lifted and so far I’ve posted one picture, replied to my followers through DM and shared a few stories (stories were never blocked for me).

What would you think are the best next steps for me? I know the safest way to keep growing is using adequate hashtags, creating quality content and probably advertising, but we all know those are not as fast as one would hope. I really don’t want to use any automation and would like to keep things manual. Should I wait for a few days / weeks / months before I start liking / commenting again? I don’t want to do follow/unfollow either (I hate when people do that to me). I know it is hard to gauge, but considering my story, what would a “safe” number of likes per day and total per month be in order to avoid any future bans or blocks? Thank you so much in advance for your help and again, sorry for my newbieness!

What’s a “7 day block”? Was your account disabled and you had to dispute it or?

Hi! No, it was just a 7 day hard block from posting, commenting, following / unfollowing and liking posts. All I could do was share stories, send DMs and replies and like comments.