Hello guys!
I’ve been reading the forum almost for a year now, it has been such a great journey so far!
Thank you so much for the insights and tips for cracking the Instagram algorithm
Shame on me that I didn’t participate in the community life earlier.
Actually, most of my questions have already been asked before so I guess I just could properly use the “search” function lol
Also, I’ve finally reached the point where I can share my knowledge so hopefully it’s going to be mutually beneficial cooperation
As of now, my travel account is slightly above 10k followers with an average engagement of 7%.
I used the follow/unfollow method for the most part as long as I didn’t see any other option of boosting my account’s growth. I’ve just started questioning whether or not this is was the right decision.
Currently I’m trying to switch to other methods of growing such as engagement groups.
Considering the account size, I feel that it is the best bet.
The only problem is that at this point, before starting to participate in engagement groups, I don’t receive the “explore” impressions at all.
I find it reasonable to expect seeing at least some impressions “From Explore”. At least a single one. But it’s not happening now.
In fact, none of my posts received a single impression “From Explore” since Instagram launched this “Impressions” breakdown under the Insights.
Something definitely feels wrong to me. It might be the case that I’m overthinking though.
Just to give you a bit of context - here’s what the insights of my recent post looks like:
So what do you think. How much “explore” impressions do you normally get?
Do you think it’s ok not to have a single “explore” impression at this account size?
I blame the Instagram algorithm and the follow/unfollow method for everything!
Yeah almost stopped follow/unfollow for now. Want to see if it’s gonna change anything. I plan to reduce activity more and more until I see any result. Will keep you updated
it doesn’t look like it would show up if it would be zero. At least I see the following combinations: “home - profile - location - other” and “home - profile - hashtags - other”, it means that some posts have 0 impressions from hashtags, some have 0 from location, but those rows don’t show up.
Which is kinda weird too as long as I don’t see more than 4 rows anywhere in my insights. But maybe it’s just me. So it’s always “home”, “profile”, “other”. And either “location” or “hashtags”. Which looks suspicious
I’m pretty sure explore can also fall under the “other” category. I use a shadowban checker for each post, I won’t post the link, you can google it, and even with that says I’m in the clear and showing up for hashtags some of the time there’s no explore displayed. Also I tend to see explore early on, then move to just showing other. I share each post on twitter so I’m assuming for me at least, other is explore + twitter hits.
F/u does not cause shadow bans, continue it. You either posted something not to Instagrams liking or most likely a bad hashtag …bet it’s a hashtag that got you in trouble.
I have been studying this point with the new IG mobile analysis, I will post a case study soon, but it seems that past methods may need an once of tweaking to be successful in the future.
P.S. How many hashtags per post do you use? and are they optimized for your engagement?
