Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing platform. With approximately 400 million monthly active users and features like Instagram Stories and InstaLive, Instagram has become the most influential social media platform. This’s why, not only businesses and brands, rather bloggers who are looking to drive engagement and keep them top of mindarejumping on the bandwagon of Instagram to get closer to their followers and deliver a story that boosts their personality.
But, maintaining Instagram engagement is not easy at all for bloggers. Similar to other social networks, it also needs quality content, dedication and more than that, creativity. But, then what, when engagement rate decreases instead of increasing after doing all the best. What could be the reasons?
To help you figure out, here are top 4 reasons why bloggers engagement is proly dropping on Instagram. (Source – http://naomidsouza.com/drop-in-engagement/)Take a look.
(1) Shadow Ban
A majority of users is puzzled because of their dropping engagement rate. If look from the beginning to end, everything seems fine which makes it a little hard to find out why – until they log out or check their posts from another account. After that, they see their post is not in any hashtag grids which they have posted with. They are completely invisible.
If you are not using #’s for posting, you are posting as a private to only your followers. So, being removed from all hashtag visibility can be a reason for the big drop in engagement.
This can be because of some ‘bad habits’ –
a) Using same hashtags every day.
b) Using bots or automated likes
c) Follow to unfollow practice
For removing ‘shadowban’, a user needs to desist from the above activities. Some reports have also suggested that taking a break from posting after banning these activities for some time can give benefits.
Instagram is on its way to maintain the authenticity of the platform. In fact, it has deleted nearly all such apps which allow to purchase likes/followers from the AppStore.
(2) “Followers to following” ratio
Instagram is much like Facebook. If you don’t interface with the followers, you will not appear on their pages.
For example -
Select a friend which you rarely see in your feed on Facebook. Check his profile and like some posts. Then, check your feed next day. You will be surprised to see that his posts are added into your feed.
The main point here is mutual engagement. If in the past, your posts were getting nice engagement, it was due to reliance on hashtags, which are not in use today.
There is a simple logic – if you are not following your followers, they are not going to see your posts. Instagram has also accepted that Hashtags don’t work today as they in the past and they are encouraging users to get new engagement in the old style which is by posting quality content.
(3) You have bad engagement
Remember point no.2 –due to excess reliance on hashtags. By using social media platforms, people connect with friends, family and create new friendships. But, we have turned the platform into a marketplace and rather than people, marketers are using hashtags.
The main aim behind marketers using hashtags is to get more publicity for their accounts and connect with other marketers. Whereas, the motive of social media is to connect with common people, not other marketers.
This can result in negative effects because of which Instagram can decrease your reach.
(4) Business accounts
A lot of articles has given hint over that our business account is one of the main reasons for bad engagement. Half of our followers don’t see the content that we post. This’s why, sometimes we get the notification like –‘Your post is performing better than other posts on a page. Promote it to get better results’. Instagram is also running a business. If it will not make money, how will it work? It’s all a game of money.
Therefore, if you own a business, Instagram loves to have you on its board, but as a business so that you can advertise with them. Else, gear up to get demoted by Instagram algorithm.