An Uphill Battle
Being a social media influencer is not easy. If you are one, you already know this. From struggling to stay inspired, to finding a work life/personal life balance we have a whole stock of challenges that non influencers don’t even think of. Although it may appear that life is a bunch of fun vacations, amazing outfits, and happy smiles…there is still a lot of work and time that goes into all of our content.
I myself am not an expert on this topic. As I’ve been influencing for a little under a year most of these obstacles are very new to me as well. But over the past 8 months or so I have learned a lot about the industry and just how challenging it can be. So if you are an influencer and you’ve been wondering what the heck has been going on with your Instagram engagement lately, read on.
The Shadow Ban
What exactly is the Instagram shadow ban? I can tell you as much as I know, but it’s still a developing topic.
Any who, over the past few weeks I’ve noticed my engagement on Instagram has started to drop. I couldn’t quite figure out why because I felt that I was putting just as much love and effort into each post. Therefore, I didn’t feel as if the quality of my posts had gone down, and I felt that my engagement shouldn’t go down either. Over this past weekend my boyfriend Clayton and I were reading up on the Instagram Shadow Ban buzz. Basically what this means is that your posts may not be showing up on any of the hashtags you’re using. It appears that some of my posts are shadow banned from quite a few of the hashtags I use on a regular basis. This was extremely shocking and disappointing to me. I have never felt I was abusing hashtags and I was never alerted that my account was flagged for this. You can read more about the Instagram Shadow ban on social media guru Alex Tooby’s blog here.
What Next?
So basically the shadow ban means you’ve abused some part of Instagram’s community guidelines. It can be anything from using bots (which I do NOT) or overusing hashtags. This is what got me “banned” so to speak. The frustrating thing is, I don’t abuse or inappropriately use hashtags. I do continually use a set of hashtags because I feel that they are relevant and applicable to my content. This allows a wider audience to search and discover my work. This will hopefully help them find what they are looking for.
From here forward I am going to get more creative with my hashtags. It’s going to be challenging to constantly be implementing new, underused, relevant hashtags. But I think that’s the best I can do at this point. Alex Tooby’s blog post has some great tips and tricks to work through the ban as well.
I think it’s also a great reminder to keep yourself busy and relevant with many platforms. This whole shadow ban thing has me feeling as if I’ve been putting all my eggs into one basket so to speak. I spend a lot of time on Instagram and I consider it my main marketing tool. However, because it’s guidelines, rules, etc. are completely out of our control we have to be sure to have other things going for ourselves. This way, if we aren’t able to achieve the same reach through this or any platform, we still have other avenues to count on.
What do you guys think about all this? Let me know your thoughts below!
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