Just discovered mpsocial & very appreciative of all the information being shared here. I’ve done some searching on shadowbanning as it’s something that’s been effecting my personal account for over 2 weeks.
I noticed some unusual activity on the account just prior to a huge drop in engagement. The account is small (circa 3k) but was garnering 20% likes & around 35 unique comments on each post. It took a large time investment to reach this level but unfortunately some bad advice & stupidity on my part led me to believe I could use a service to organically grow the account at a faster rate. I ended up getting multiple suspicious login attempts, which i accepted & then, against my guidance a large number of poor non target accounts were followed/unfollowed in quick succession. A bot was clearly used.
I changed my password & revoked the access & continued to utilise IG in a normal way but got an instant but temporary comment ban when trying to reply to comments on my own profile. A new post then received around 1/6th of the likes previously experienced & every subsequent post has received the same dire result since. None of the hashtags or account tags I have used contain my images.
I’ve attempted to remedy by:
Removing any hashtags in the first comment
Taking several 2/3 day breaks from posting
Mixing up any regular hashtags with new, smaller hashtags
Checking for broken hashtags
Using no hashtags at all
Contacting IG through the app and reporting a problem (several times)
Setting up a new account with new sim card, new cell, new email - instant shadowban! wtf.
Is there any way of recovering my old stats? Its pretty demoralising posting original HQ images which have very little visibility to anyone outside my following.
Would a switch to a business account rectify anything?
PM me your username and when you post, along with the approximate date of when you think the shadow ban occurred.
OK.
Smaller accounts tend to have a higher overall engagement as compared to accounts that have 100K followers or more. Thats why the shift in marketing to smaller influencers.
You do know where you are posting this right? It sounds like they were too aggressive and had poor targeting.
Were you using comments with the growth service? Were your “normal” comments too similar?
It depends on how big your account grew to with them, you revoked access so now you are no longer engaging with people so it’s typical to see a a drop.
Thanks v much for your help wortime. I’ll try to expand on a couple of things you highlighted because I wasn’t clear. I’m separately PM’ing you the details also.
No it was purely like/follow/unfollow. However, I was still replying to comments on my own page while this was happening.
To clarify, the service was used for only 1 day. My account saw no growth. Over 600 people were followed over the course of this day which I did not deem safe & the users targeted were dreadful (no posts, clearly would not engage with my own account).I revoked access as the service was not as described. This is how I can say with certainty my drop was directly related to the activity. Engagement halved over night. It was engagement I had built myself.
If you only used the service for one day ad you had MULTIPLE suspicious login attempts then they likely have zero idea of what they are doing.
If on the first day they followed AND unfollowed then, well, WTF. [quote=“casperghost, post:3, topic:30550”]
users targeted were dreadful (no posts, clearly would not engage with my own account)
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Bad targeting. When you do the follow and unfollow thing you will be following people for a brief period that you normally would not engage with.
I know… alarm bells were ringing. Managed to do a fair amount of damage in a very short period of time. I understand in the scheme of things this is a very small account, but a decent amount of effort had been put into getting it to where it was in a natural way.
