How do you know if you're shadowbanned on Instagram?
Have you heard of the term 'shadowbanned'? Let us fill you in.
Since you’ve found yourself reading this article, it’s safe to assume you’re well acquainted with Instagram being one of the most popular social media platforms! With over a BILLION active users worldwide (yep you read correctly), it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. As the algorithm is ever-changing, it might feel like some of your posts aren’t getting the attention they deserve...
Whilst this can be put down to many causes and usually isn’t a cause for immediate panic, in some cases, there could be a more insidious reason behind a notable lack of engagement, and that’s a Shadowban.
Sounds scary, huh? Let us explain. A shadowban is an Instagram practice where an account’s visibility is reduced without the account owner knowing it - hence the notion of “shadowbanned” or “hidden”.
This means the account’s posts won’t appear in hashtags or on the explore page for new viewers, making it harder for a greater audience to discover the account and hindering overall visibility and growth.
So, if you suspect your account is shadowbanned, here are some key signs to look out for.
1. Your Posts Aren’t Appearing in Hashtags
One of the most obvious indications your account might be shadowbanned is when your posts aren’t showing up in hashtags. Usually, when you include a hashtag in your post, it will appear on the corresponding hashtag page under “recent” tags, making it easier for people to discover your content. If your posts aren’t appearing in the recent hashtags tab right after you post, Instagram has likely shadowbanned your account.
2. Your Engagement Has Decreased
Another telltale sign that your account might be shadowbanned is an unexplained decrease in engagement. If your likes, comments, shares and organic reach have significantly decreased, it could be a sign that your account is no longer being made visible to your current followers or new accounts. This decrease in engagement can happen suddenly or gradually, so keep an eye on your metrics.
3. Your Account Has Received a Warning Message
If Instagram has identified any suspicious activity on your account, you might receive a warning message. This message could warn you about the use of bots or other automated services that violate Instagram’s terms of service. In some cases, Instagram might also inform you that your account has been shadowbanned.
4. Your Follower Growth Has Stopped
If your account has stopped gaining new followers or has significantly slowed down, it could be a sign that you’ve been shadowbanned. This is because your posts aren’t appearing on the explore page or in hashtags, making it harder for people to discover your account.
5. Your Posts Aren’t Visible to Your Followers
Lastly, if your posts are no longer appearing in your follower’s feeds, it could be a sign that your account has been shadowbanned. This often happens when Instagram detects suspicious activity on your account, or if you’ve appeared to violate Instagram’s terms of service.
We get it, a Shadowban can be extremely frustrating for any Instagram user, therefore it’s essential to know the signs to look out for. If you suspect that your account has been affected, it’s crucial to review your account activity and ensure that you’re following Instagram’s terms of service (Follow Instagram’s Terms and Guidelines here). If you’re still having trouble, we recommend reaching out to Instagram’s support team for assistance. Remember, creating engaging, unique content and following the best practices is the best way to avoid a shadowban and grow your Instagram following organically.
Want to know more about social media best practice, or work with our team? Get in touch today.
Instagram makes a return to stills
Photo lovers on Instagram rejoice!
Earlier this week, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri stated that the platform has had too great a focus on video content and will look to make photos more of a priority once again in 2023.
“I think we were overfocused on video in 2022 and pushed ranking too far, and basically showed too many videos and not enough photos. We’ve since balanced, so things like how often someone likes photos versus videos, and how often someone comments on photos versus videos, are roughly equal, which is a good sign that things are balanced.” - Mosseri
But hold up - before you ditch video all together, remember - a strong strategy is one that prioritises creating great content that speaks to your audience and objectives, regardless of it’s format.
We recommend sharing a balance of content types on Instagram, including videos, graphics, photos and carousel posts to appeal to all aspects of the algorithm, as well as to your different target demographics who may prefer one content type over the other.
As for a return to stills on Instagram? It may take a while to see these changes come to fruition, so it’s always best to ensure you're keeping on top of things by regularly reviewing your analytics and results.
Is it time to review your 2023 social media strategy? Contact us to schedule in a call with our strategy team.
Social Media News - January 2023
We're back with the latest Social Media News in 2023!
There is quite a bit happening in Instagram at the moment. Here's a quick rundown.
- Notes - Now you can share your thoughts with friends with up to 60 character messages of just text and emojis!
- Add Yours - Easily jump on ‘Add Yours’ trends, by inviting friends to participate in 'Add Yours' by tapping pass it on when you see a prompt that reminds you of them.
- Candid Stories - It’s all about keeping it real on the ‘gram these days and the new candid story option is no exception. Capture what you’re doing right now in a story that’s only visible to other friends who also share their candid update.
- Group Profiles - The new update will allow you to create and join a new Group Profile where you can share posts and stories in a seperate dedicated profile that is only visible to the profile and members.
- Collaborative Collections - Connect with friends who have the same interests by saving posts to a collaborative collection in your group or DMs!
How will the latest social media news affect business?
All of these new updates reinforce Instagram’s focus on supporting connections and private interactions on the platform.
The Group Profile update and Collaborative Collections features are of particular note to businesses, who can begin to think of new ways to engage their audience.
Group Profiles could be a great way to promote community building and interaction for your brand, by using this new feature to encourage members to share additional content such as behind the scenes content or UGC (think things like recipes using your product or users #OOTD featuring your brand).
The Collaborative Collections feature further entices brands to ensure content that is being posted is of high value so it is more likely to be saved in a collaborative collection group / DM.
Do you want to discuss the latest social media news or your social media strategy with our expert team? Get in touch today.
Want to keep up with our latest business news on LinkedIn? Follow us here.
Is it time to BeReal?
By now, you've no doubt heard about BeReal. BeReal is a photo-sharing app that prompts users to post once per day, at the same time as all of their friends. There is no opportunity to add a filter, or edit the image, which is taken by both your front and back camera at the same time.
Launching in 2019, it was mid-2022 when the app really took off. As of October 2022, it was the top social networking app on the App Store and has been installed over 29.5 million times.
BeReal's key demographic in Australia:
- Female: 98.7%
- Male: 1.3%
- Age:
- 16-25: 90.7%
- 26-44: 2.1%
- 45+: 7.3%
Are brands on BeReal?
Well, some are. Brands like Chipolte have cleverly used the app to post a different promotional code each day, building hype and anticipation for the once-a-day post to go out. Moreso, we are seeing the dual-camera format being replicated on other apps, as a meme that is directly relevant to key target demographics in the 16-25 bracket.
Why is it so popular within this age bracket? "This is what Gen Z wants from social media: unfiltered, uncurated content that doesn’t ask you to buy anything or make you feel bad about your life. It’s a fun place to be. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters." - Hootsuite
It's also important to keep in mind that both TikTok + Instagram are working on BeReal features within their own apps - which speaks to BeReal's true power in 2023.
Do you want to discuss BeReal and how it could be integrated into your social media strategy with our team? Get in touch today.
Want to catch up with us on social media? Visit us on Instagram.
A guide to nailing social media trends
Every social media strategy in 2023 needs a pillar dedicated to social media trends.
While every business’ approach will vary, an awareness of trends and ability to adapt quickly to platform changes is so important in todays’ landscape.
Some key tips to nailing social media trends within your content strategy are:
💙 Make sure you’re staying on top of what’s trending every week. (If you subscribe to our Social Media Trends Report, this will magically land in your inbox weekly - no scrolling required!
💙 Identify when trends are relevant to your business. Some trends will work for your brand and your objectives, and some wont! There’s no need to try to jump on every trend that emerges - be selective and utilise trends that work best with your authentic tone of voice
💙 Act on trends quickly. There’s no time for a 4 week approval process here - if you’re not acting on a trend within 48 hours, you’re too late
💙 Create and edit your content within platform where you can. Stats are suggesting that native content created within app outperforms content designed and edited elsewhere
💙 Remember that trending content doesn’t need to be perfect. While it can be challenging for brands to move away from slick, professionally designed content that has been through months of revisions and approvals, we know that the audience today is craving authenticity. Not every piece of content you share needs to be perfect - it just needs to create positive sentiment with your audience
If you are keen to update your 2023 social strategy to include authentic, fast moving, native or trending content, subscribe to our Weekly Social Media Trend Report.
When you sign up you’ll receive:
💙 A report of trending content, magically landing in your inbox each week
💙 Actionable content prompts to tap into trends
The cost? $10 per week. No scrolling required, no minimum sign up, cancel anytime.
Sounds pretty good right?
Click here to learn more and subscribe!
Social Media News, September 2022
Here is the latest Social Media News this month.
A Hootsuite and We Are Social study has found that in the last quarter of 2022, a major slowdown of social media growth has occurred —an expected finding in the post-pandemic world. Social media user growth is continuing to level off, leaving us with an incremental increase (1.0% to be exact) that signals we’re moving back to a period of slow and steady growth.
Tiktok continues to grow, grow, grow! Over half a million new users joined the platform every single day last quarter, with the number of people using TikTok for news doubling since last year. The report also found that people spend more time on TikTok each day than any other social app, meaning brands have a great opportunity to engage audiences in a fun, entertaining, and educational way. Key takeaway: Make sure Tiktok is a part of your social media marketing because its power is WILD.
Reels are here to stay. Consider this your reminder to continue sharing Reels on Instagram because they aren't going away anytime soon! The ad audience for Facebook Reels has increased by a massive 279% in the past 3 months, which means you can now reach 473.5 million users. You can also reach a staggering 754.8 million users with Instagram Reels ads. So what can we takeaway from this? This is proof that short, entertaining, less polished videos are an unbeatable way to reach your audience on social.
Whilst Facebook might be the grandad of social media networks, it drives a whopping 75.27% of all website traffic generated by social. Why? Because links are currency on the platform. The takeaway? Where possible, drive traffic to a website via links in posts.
We hope you enjoyed the latest social media news.
Want to chat to our team about managing your social media platforms? Reach out today.
Social Media News, August 2022
There is plenty of social media news to share this week!
Instagram news - or what's NOT happening!
How quickly things can change! Instagram have recently said that it is hitting pause on the rollout of new features on its app following backlash online from users, influencers and celebrities. The new updates (full-screen viewing and an increase in post recommendations) were criticised as people felt they were not seeing photos from friends and family as much.
A Meta spokesperson has said: "Based on our findings and community feedback, we're pausing the full-screen test on Instagram so we can explore other options, and we're temporarily decreasing the number of recommendations you see in your feed so we can improve the quality of your experience.
If you haven't heard of BeReal, you better listen up because it's about to be BIG.
BeReal is a new social media app which is trending amongst Zillennials (those born between 1993 and 1998). The app prompts you to take one photo per day at a random time. It takes a front and back camera image at the same time. BeReal is making waves with Zillenials due to its authentic nature. You won't find influencers, filters, or ads on the app - just real, authentic content from users. A BeReal user stated: “Whilst Instagram is promoting an 'ideal' of living, BeReal instead shows the "real" us, no filters. We feel more natural and have more connections to our peers, which is essentially what the generation (Gen Z) values.”
While it is not currently a platform companies participate in, there have been lots of "fake" BeReal's popping up across meme accounts. View some examples on the left.
Interestingly, BeReal has skyrocketed up the list of apps with the highest number of active users for the month of July. It was placed higher than the likes of Uber and Facebook, showing it's growing popularity.
Want to know more about the latest social media news or book in a consultation session with our team to make sure your social media strategy is up to date? Get in touch today.
Want to check out our latest work? Visit us on Instagram.
Instagram News, July 2022
Another month, another Instagram update! Here is the latest Instagram news.
Instagram Pin Feature
Instagram has a new feature allowing you to pin posts to the top of the feed. We see this being useful for highlighting the following:
- Competitions: Keeping competitions at the top of your feed
- New Launch/Product: Having a new product launch at the top of the feed
- Top performing posts: If a reel went viral you could pin it to the top of the feed
This feature will be beneficial to many brands and we are eager to test it out on our client campaigns.
In other Instagram news, engagement rates are trending down on traditional feed posts
Based on a Later study of 81M Instagram posts, the average engagement rate for feed posts in 2019 was 5.16%. By the end of 2021, this number decreased to 2.88%.
The downward trend is consistent for all traditional feed posts (images, carousels, and videos).
Traditional video feed posts saw the greatest decline year-over-year on average, while carousel posts consistently performed the best in terms of engagement
Why have traditional Instagram Feed Posts seen a decline in performance?
In a nutshell: The introduction of Instagram Reels in August 2020.
It’s no secret that Reels are a priority for the app, and as such, other post types have taken a back seat.
In order to boost engagement on the app, it’s important to include Reels and also carousel posts in your social media posting schedule.
Do you need assistance in staying across the latest Instagram news and managing your social media channels? Get in touch with our team today.
Want to stay up to date? Visit us on Instagram.
Want to chat to our team about Instagram Reels content creation? Reach out to our specialist team via email, [email protected]
Latest Social Media News, June 2022
In the ever-changing social media landscape, it’s important to keep up to date! We’ve compiled some of the latest social news and features to catch you up to speed.
It’s all about Instagram at the moment. Within the past few months, Instagram have implemented several updates which could affect your social media campaign and goals.
Instagram Testing
Instagram are currently undertaking quite a number of tests across the platform. It's important to note that Instagram chooses a small percentage of users, from across the world to test new features with. Not all users participate in tests, however tests usually change these users experiences significantly.
Please find links to articles expanding on different Instagram tests currently running:
We expect to see a decrease in engagement from users in testing, as feedback so far has been that these new features have decreased user satisfaction.
Instagram Feed Sorting
After testing new feed sorting options earlier this year, the Following and Favourites feed have been rolled out to all Instagram accounts.
These new feeds are:
- Home: The current feed view includes suggestions of posts from people you're not following
- Favourites: This feed allows users to choose their friends and family, and their favourite influencers into one feed.
- Following: The traditional chronological feed is coming back!
After implementation, we have noticed a drop off in impressions across all accounts - this means less people are seeing posts. However, this is what we typically see when a new feature is introduced. Over the last few weeks impressions have begun to pick up again, and we will keep an eye out on how these stats track over the coming months.
Best Types of Posts for Engagement
Scheduling platform Later recently released a report, after reviewing 81 million Instagram feed posts (noting this excludes Reels) to reveal what post types are best performing in 2022.
Carousel posts returned the best average engagement rate at 3.11%, followed by image posts (2.76%) and video (2.60%). This means that we need to be implementing more carousel posts into our social planners!
That's the latest social media news this month. Stay tuned for more updates!
Want to work with our team? Contact us to find out more.
What’s the deal with Instagram Reels?
In typical Instagram fashion, mid-2020 Instagram launched a TikTok reboot on their platform. Almost a carbon-copy of the short-length video platform, Instagram Reels takes the best performing features from TikTok and reinvents them the Instagram way.
So, six months on, with a few strategic nip and tucks we’re able to take a better look at Instagram Reels, what it means for agencies, brands and personal profiles – and work out how to make the most of it!
Best posting practice
We all know that Facebook and Instagram can be cagey about algorithms and updates, which often leads to endless guessing games about best posting practice. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has been rumour busting every Friday on his Instagram stories (if you’re not following him – this is your sign to!). Most recently Mosseri discussed what users need to do to avoid red flags and restrictions on Reels.
- Avoid TikTok (or other platforms) watermarks. Mosseri stated outright that videos that are “visibly recycled from other apps (i.e, contains logos or watermarks)” won’t be recommended as often as other videos.
- Avoid low resolution or blurry videos. We recommend minimising the number of apps you use to create your Reels to avoid low-res videos. Using the Reel’s camera and editing tools is your best bet! They want you to be creating original content on their platform after all.
- Minimise the amount of text you’re using, and make sure it doesn’t cover majority of your video.
So you like making your videos on TikTok and you want to continue to use the platform to edit and publish…
No stress! There is any easy way to save your TikTok’s without a watermark on iOS!
- When viewing your TikTok, press the menu (three dots underneath the comment section on bottom right)
- Select Live Photo from the export menu
- Go to your Camera Roll to find the Live Photo. Select the share menu in the bottom left hand corner.
- Scroll through the options until you find Save As Video and select.
- Find your new video in your Camera Roll. Select Edit in the top right hand corner.
- Select the crop tool from the bottom tool menu.
- Select the tool that looks like three overlapping squares from the top tool bar.
- Select 9:16 from the bottom toolbar and crop the small TikTok watermark out of your video. Select done.
And you’re good to go! Just make sure that the video is still if a clear quality before you upload.
Stuck on content ideas for Instagram Reels?
We’re here to help! Here are a few different content ideas that work across most industries:
- Behind the scenes content: No matter what type of business you run, there’s a 99% chance your audience will LOVE behind the scenes content. An easy way to capture this is to put your camera on time-lapse as you pack up orders, style a product photo or work through orders.
A popular trend on TikTok and Reels is daily vlogs. If you feel confident enough to film yourself throughout your day and add a voice over, then we’d recommend trialling this too! - Before and after: Everyone loves a B&A! Think of different ways you could capture the change or effect you have as you work or on your clients / customers.
- Instructional: Whatever you do, there will always be someone who looks up to you and wants to learn from you! Can you break down simple daily tasks in easily digestible ways for your Reels?
Reels is heavily trend and music driven, both of which change week to week! So we recommend making sure you spend some quality time on Reels to keep track of current trends.
Remember that Instagram rewards users who utilise all of it’s features like Reels, IGTV or Live – so if you haven’t already taken a dip into the Reel’s pond, it could be worth the investment!
Stay tuned to Adam Mosseri’s Instagram stories and the Instagram Creators page for updates to features and trends.
Want to work with our team to create amazing content for your business? Get in touch today.