Would you still count this as fact if only some niche accounts are getting worst engagement?
For the accounts I handle this isn’t widespread.
I’m just pointing this out because most people will wait out this engagement drop instead of taking action or reevaluating their position, which won’t help their situation at all.
Obviously, if the account is being flagged as undesirable (because you got PV, you’re posting bad hashtags or content) it’s normal that your engagement will drop 50-90%.
Everyone has to remember they’re fighting for limited attention. Your competition is always getting better. If your content strategy has been the same for over a year, it’s quite normal that your engagement isn’t doing great.
They’ve been pretty clear about “shadowbans” this year. It totally fits with our experiences.
It’s also not as simple as posting banned hashtags, that was probably how their AI started learning what was “non-recommendable” as they call it. It’s now a lot clever, as you should expect from these machine learning monsters.
On the other hand, user experience on the explore page is greater than ever, meaning most people will spend their time there. If your post doesn’t find its way there, you’re not going to do as good as you used to.
We used to think of the explore as a way to go viral (back when top posts were seen by the whole community), now it’s just something you have to hit daily/weekly to keep up with the competition.
I won’t trust another app to do this necessarily. I would rather find ways to do it myself. If you do know of any ways, please let me know. In the meantime I’m going to try find some guides.
Using Jarvee (or other automation service) you can create settings that ‘remove followers’ who havent engaged with the account in a while, have less than X pictures, haven’t posted in X days. That could help.
Just like there are Follow/Unfollow settings, there are “block” settings, in that you can block accounts which forces them to unfollow you, this also has a remove follower option.
