As someone who makes a living from my Instagram small businesses and teaches others how to do it as well, one of the questions I most often receive from my readers is: “My Instagram stopped growing and is losing followers. I’m worried shadowbanned. What can I do?”
If you’re reading this article because you’re asking yourself a similar question, I have good and bad news for you.
The good news is that there’s an easy and reliable way that you can directly check if you’re shadowbanned that doesn’t require you to resort to a sketchy “Instagram shadowban test” website that’s…
Yes, there are ways to optimize every single thing that you do on Instagram in order to grow faster but, truth be told, you don’t have to slog your life away on the app to have an account that looks good and gets the job done.
There’s a way to manage your Instagram in which you can spend 20% of the time and get 80% of the results most dedicated social media managers would garner for you while working full-time.
How do I know? Spending as little time as possible managing my Instagrams while still making them visually appealing and…
More users will begin to lose followers and/or find it much harder to generate reach, engagement, and growth
The slow but continuous surge in the number of people that are no longer growing and/or losing followers on Instagram has a lot of us asking “is Instagram dead/dying?” Sadly, for most people reading this article, the answer is yes, but not for everyone and not for the reasons you expect.
But before we get into why it’s dying, it’s important to get clear on what “Instagram dying” means.
What does Instagram dying mean?
From my experience, when people talk about “Instagram dying” they refer to the perceived lack of growth and engagement for a significant portion of accounts on the platform.
When a lot…
The most simple, effective, reliable, and often overlooked growth tactic on Instagram is maximizing your daily interactions. It doesn’t require any special software, content format, or much skill to execute really, all it requires is that you understand how it works and that you do it every day.
What Are Instagram Interactions
Instagram interactions are simply the ways you can interact with another user on the platform. It’s whenever you like, comment, and/or tag another Instagram user and they receive the notification of that interaction on their Activity Feed.
I’ve got a formula and a spreadsheet you can steal
One of the questions I’ve most often been asked by small business owners over the years is “how often should I post on Instagram?” and my answer is always “each account’s optimal posting frequency is different”.
There is no one posting frequency at which all Instagram accounts grow the fastest. Each account’s content and audience is unique, and therefore, each account’s optimal posting frequency (the posting frequency at which they grew the fastest) will be unique.
The only way to discover what your optimal posting frequency is, is to, every week, measure how many times you posted, how many new…
How to save time and improve workflow
The most time-consuming and inefficient part of managing and growing an Instagram account is the time and energy it takes to stop everything you’re doing several times a day to take out your phone, open Instagram, take/upload a photo, write a caption and publish a post.
Although posting consistently is an important part of getting people to discover your Instagram account, disrupting your daily workflow to do it, doesn’t have to be.
In my case, I have to post at least 20 times a week for my Instagram small businesses (@pinlord / @potteryforall / @macramemakers), and I do it all…
Most of us forget that getting discovered on Instagram is only half the battle when it comes to building a sustainable audience and business on Instagram. What’s the other half? Retaining them as followers once they discover your account.
Without having an account that is crafted to retain the traffic you drive to it, you’ll be wasting your time and energy reaching people because everyone that discovers you won’t perceive enough value in your page to follow you and/or buy your products. The result? …
Breaking down the process of discovery to its most basic elements
How fast your Instagram business grows depends on two things:
- How many people you reach, or how many people discover your account (your small business) on the platform.
- What percentage of them you retain. Once they discover your account, what percentage of them perceive enough value from your Instagram bio, your Instagram grid layout, and your content to be retained (follow you) and/or consider buying what you sell.
Instagram users want to consume content that will entertain them and/or give them value, not to consume content about a product
The key to successfully selling your products and services on Instagram is first and foremost, being able to create great content, not great products.
Why? Instagram is a company that exists to maximize profits by maximizing the attention they capture from their users. They do that through the Instagram algorithm that shows people the most engaging content on the platform first.
Instagram, and therefore, the algorithm doesn’t care how “good” your products are, it cares how engaging your content is because keeping people engaged on the platform is how they make money.
The mistake most small business owners make when…
Regardless of how much you know about Instagram growth tactics, the likelihood of growing and monetizing your account sustainably and for a long period of time mostly depends on the level of saturation of your Instagram niche.
It’s a hard pill to swallow for most aspiring Instagram entrepreneurs, but accepting that reality and taking the necessary steps to pivot into a niche in which you have a higher likelihood of success is the difference between being endlessly frustrated by your lack of growth (check out my article about Is Instagram dying? …
Eduardo Morales
@pinlord 📌 @potteryforall 🌱 & @macramemakers 🍶on Instagram. Demystifying how Instagram works👌🏽 Follow for updates: https://instagram.com/theeduardomorales
