Help! 0% Discovery? hashtags hardly any impressions.

[willteasle]

I really dont know what to do, since switching to business a couple of weeks ago my engagement has plummeted.
I noticed before that posts with hashtags didn't see any engagement increase, in fact I stopped using them for a while all together. My impressions confirm this.
The impressions tell me that only 5 likes came from hashtags. I used 8 hashtags all targeted with less than 200 000 likes on that hashtag. This really cant be right?
I have 25k followers all of them active ( I deleted all 8000 followers who hadn't been active for over 90 days.)
Is instagram throttling me? OR is my content just not connecting with my audience?
I mean its all original high quality content... I was hitting 700-1000 likes before switching to business account.
I'm really at a loss.

These are my impressions for my last post that only got 200 likes despite 3000 impressions? I have 25k followers why is it so low?

 

[Rishana]

Literally just posted about this earlier today.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/percentage-of-impressions-from-non-followers.994148/

I've spent the past 10 hours or so looking into things and I think I have an answer. Keep in mind the follow is 100% conjecture and may be completely off base.

First of all, take a look at your impressions. I am at around 36k and I see around 6-8k impressions per post. I connected with a friend in the same niche and we traded analytics and what I can see is that though being only at 28k followers, he is getting 10k impressions. My content is better and therefore total engagement is higher BUT his ratios are better (he's at about 5% and I'm just under 4%).

Looking at your stats, it seems you have been doing follow/unfollow like me OR you've been buying followers. Your total impressions are really low and that to me is a red flag. As I mentioned above, I am in a similar situation but not as bad. What I think is going on here is either we have a share of useless followers OR we're being throttled in some way by Instagram.

As for the 0%, don't worry. This is a rounded down number. The amount of traffic that ACTUALLY comes from hashtags has been grossly overestimated. I mean when's the last time you used the search function to look up a tag? Where the virility comes from is hitting the explore page and that is unrelated to hashtags as far as I understand.

By the way, what did you use to throw away inactive followers?

 

[willteasle]

Literally just posted about this earlier today.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/percentage-of-impressions-from-non-followers.994148/

I've spent the past 10 hours or so looking into things and I think I have an answer. Keep in mind the follow is 100% conjecture and may be completely off base.

First of all, take a look at your impressions. I am at around 36k and I see around 6-8k impressions per post. I connected with a friend in the same niche and we traded analytics and what I can see is that though being only at 28k followers, he is getting 10k impressions. My content is better and therefore total engagement is higher BUT his ratios are better (he's at about 5% and I'm just under 4%).

Looking at your stats, it seems you have been doing follow/unfollow like me OR you've been buying followers. Your total impressions are really low and that to me is a red flag. As I mentioned above, I am in a similar situation but not as bad. What I think is going on here is either we have a share of useless followers OR we're being throttled in some way by Instagram.

As for the 0%, don't worry. This is a rounded down number. The amount of traffic that ACTUALLY comes from hashtags has been grossly overestimated. I mean when's the last time you used the search function to look up a tag? Where the virility comes from is hitting the explore page and that is unrelated to hashtags as far as I understand.

By the way, what did you use to throw away inactive followers?

I never did the follow/unfollow but the past 3 years I have used follow liker by liking 1000 pics a day... this was at my peak netting me 100 followers a day. Though people would just follow and not like. So I dont think they are fake followers, but maybe instagram has made me not appear in their feed unless they actively engaged in my content? Maybe following is not enough.

I might try like all my followers pics and see if that boosts engagement.

I used a tool called "cleaner for instagram" I bought the full version it was worth the money.
It takes a long time if you have a lot of followers... but basically you can select all who havent been active over a period of time (change this in settings) you can then block/unblock them. It only lets you do 100 actions an hour and unfortunately it wont let you keep the list so its a very time consuming process.
It took me a few weeks to block/unblock inactive 8000 followers, I thought it would help with my engagement, but its just the same. At least now 200 likes on 25k looks better than 200 likes on 33k haha

 

[Kornchips]

Trying promoting one of your better post or a new better post. See if the promotion does well and then post regularly again and see if there's any improvements.

 

[willteasle]

Trying promoting one of your better post or a new better post. See if the promotion does well and then post regularly again and see if there's any improvements.

I've heard boosting a post can sometimes jump start engagement. I might give it a try. I've never used the promote function before, any tips?

 

[borntoglide]

These are my impressions for my last post that only got 200 likes despite 3000 impressions? I have 25k followers why is it so low

You definitely have low reach for the size of your account, but the amount of likes for the size of your reach could be better as well. I have 5k followers (original content in travel photography niche), one of my better performing posts had 1250 likes with 3000 impressions. My recent worst performing got 2600 impressions and 670 likes.

I used the exact same method of growth as you (liking about 1000 photos a day). However I focused almost exclusively on people who liked bigger accounts (not just followers). If you didn't do the same, perhaps my followers are just more inclined to hit that like button.

This being said, I am also concerned about the health of my account. I am watching similar accounts in my niche and their posts are going somewhat viral every so often. None of mine ever did despite getting good engagement from my followers. I've read somewhere that Instagram considers any sort of excessive activity to be spam, so they are very possibly penalizing us for all that excessive liking.

 

[willteasle]

You definitely have low reach for the size of your account, but the amount of likes for the size of your reach could be better as well. I have 5k followers (original content in travel photography niche), one of my better performing posts had 1250 likes with 3000 impressions. My recent worst performing got 2600 impressions and 670 likes.

I used the exact same method of growth as you (liking about 1000 photos a day). However I focused almost exclusively on people who liked bigger accounts (not just followers). If you didn't do the same, perhaps my followers are just more inclined to hit that like button.

This being said, I am also concerned about the health of my account. I am watching similar accounts in my niche and their posts are going somewhat viral every so often. None of mine ever did despite getting good engagement from my followers. I've read somewhere that Instagram considers any sort of excessive activity to be spam, so they are very possibly penalizing us for all that excessive liking.

Yeah thats a good point! I never thought that I might actually be netting passive followers!
I think going forward I will like the pics of users who have liked a certain post.... rather than a pages followers. That might get me more engaged people who are more likely to like pics.
I do think instagram penalises bots to an extent though, they arent stupid... they can tell who uses autolikers etc.

 

[borntoglide]

I do think instagram penalises bots to an extent though, they arent stupid... they can tell who uses autolikers etc.

I did not use a bot actually, just a ton of manual actions (with the help of a little browser based program I created to facilitate the process), which they may not like very much either

 

[Rishana]

You've definitely picked up some crappy followers

You definitely have low reach for the size of your account, but the amount of likes for the size of your reach could be better as well. I have 5k followers (original content in travel photography niche), one of my better performing posts had 1250 likes with 3000 impressions. My recent worst performing got 2600 impressions and 670 likes.

I used the exact same method of growth as you (liking about 1000 photos a day). However I focused almost exclusively on people who liked bigger accounts (not just followers). If you didn't do the same, perhaps my followers are just more inclined to hit that like button.

This being said, I am also concerned about the health of my account. I am watching similar accounts in my niche and their posts are going somewhat viral every so often. None of mine ever did despite getting good engagement from my followers. I've read somewhere that Instagram considers any sort of excessive activity to be spam, so they are very possibly penalizing us for all that excessive liking.

Mentioned this in the thread that I started but check your analytics. Are you hitting the explore page at all? You should be able to see something that shows the number of impressions from explore. There may be a new type of shadowban like limit we are only now finding out about.

 

[Rishana]

Yo at @willteasle, it seems that ALL my posts were just updated with a more accurate measurement. Does it still read 0% for you? I now have between 1% and 4% showing on all posts.

 

[borntoglide]

You've definitely picked up some crappy followers


Mentioned this in the thread that I started but check your analytics. Are you hitting the explore page at all? You should be able to see something that shows the number of impressions from explore. There may be a new type of shadowban like limit we are only now finding out about.

Yes, I have a handful of impressions from explore. For today's post, which I put into a DM round, 7% of impressions came from explore. On an earlier post, which did very well likes-wise withoutdoing the rounds, there was not as many explore impressions (3% Only). I am not sure if these numbers are good or bad. This does tells me that a) engagement rounds still have some positive impact and b) I have some exposure outside of my following.

 

[willteasle]

Yo at @willteasle, it seems that ALL my posts were just updated with a more accurate measurement. Does it still read 0% for you? I now have between 1% and 4% showing on all posts.

yeah buddy! get 1% showing now lol