Shadow Banned on Social
March, 2019
Kinda like bad parenting, shadow banning is a passive aggressive way for social media platforms to deal with bad behavior.
Maybe, when you were starting out on Instagram, you did the follow/unfollow method to try to get more people attracted to your account. And maybe, after a few years, you realized that not only was following people and then unfollowing them as soon as they followed you, disingenuous and super obvious to anyone paying attention, it also negatively impacted your engagement rates.
Perhaps, instead of the follow/unfollow strategy you just liked a million people on Instagram, but you didn’t really engage with these people, so no one really followed you back and you were left with a handful of followers and a million accounts that you were following. And once you started paying attention, you realized that the people you actually wanted to start engaging with couldn’t be found on Insta because your feed was filled with the million accounts you had no real connection to.
And somewhere along the line you read about how your followers and following ratio needed to be a certain way, so you started massively unfollowing people in the same manner with which you started following them.
Then you noticed something. No one was even seeing your new posts.
You could have been shadow banned.
Here’s how to tell:
1. Create a post with a random hashtag that isn’t super popular.
2. Log into Instagram using a dummy account, or a friend’s account, that is not following your account.
3. Search for the hashtag you used in your post. If you see your post when searching for that hashtag, then you aren’t shadow banned. If your post isn’t coming up when you search, then your account is shadow banned. Uh-oh.
What does this mean? It means your hashtags won’t be searchable by non-followers. This means it will be very difficult to grow your audience.
How do you fix this?
Wait it out and you closely follow Instagram’s Terms of Services.
There isn’t a set protocol around release from shadow banning, but the industry reports it could take 48 hours to a few weeks.
So, be a good social media person and authentically engage with your audience and create your audience from a place of interest, not numbers. Keep it interesting.