Dead Account?

I have a personal account (Photography) and it has about 12k followers. And I used to bot it like about 6 months ago, but I stopped and wanted to just go naturally, but I literally 171 to 220 likes per photo. And yes photos are original and hi-quality. I know instagram has its algorithm thing going on as well, and I was thinking of posting more landscape majestic content, but I'm wondering should I just start a new one...I mean it would suck, but the engagement is horrid. Or is there a chance I can resurrect it?

Don't give up on it.. if you open it back up and do what you want, you may lose a few followers that had forgotten about your page, but if you engage with your audience they'll obviously stay and you can build it up from there.

Dont wastse time and effort building a new one, you have a good account, photography tends to be tricky when it comes to likes some do very well others dont., that doesnt mean its dead. just keep working on it.

Thanks JR, it's just frustrating, but its hard to gage where my engagement should be with so many people buying likes or being a part of engagement groups. Just trying to figure the way to go about this, but I'll stick to it.

datsunguy said:

Dont wastse time and effort building a new one, you have a good account, photography tends to be tricky when it comes to likes some do very well others dont., that doesnt mean its dead. just keep working on it.

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Thanks Ill keep at it!

try liking photos of your followers to get engagement to go up, manual work would be best for this engage with your followers and se if that pumps up the likes over time.

could be that people are seeing your photos but just arent liking.


example: i tend to like photos of people that i know and interact with over pages that havent interacted with me.

datsunguy said:

try liking photos of your followers to get engagement to go up, manual work would be best for this engage with your followers and se if that pumps up the likes over time.

could be that people are seeing your photos but just arent liking.


example: i tend to like photos of people that i know and interact with over pages that havent interacted with me.

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Oh so you're saying for the people who I don't follow, engage with them to push my account back to their attention?

yep, exactly. engage with your followers let them know your not just a photography page but there is a person behind it.

datsunguy said:

yep, exactly. engage with your followers let them know your not just a photography page but there is a person behind it.

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Ok thanks...unfortunately I got a ton of people doing the follow/unfollow on my account so the first 50 accounts are going to leave. Would use an automated service to like my followers help...or should I just keep it natural?

natural is better but time consuming. liking is also fine.

experiment yourself and see what works better.

datsunguy said:

natural is better but time consuming. liking is also fine.

experiment yourself and see what works better.

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Ok awesome thank you so kindly!

i feel your frustration, also in the photo niche now. well at least i'm turning this account and related follows in that direction.

posting women and portraits, all original that i've taken, but it's pretty dead. then again i'm also at the extreme opposite end of you, and just started growing this 2 weeks ago... only at 400 followers so it's no comparison to yours, but maybe it's the niche being over saturated?

brewsh said:

i feel your frustration, also in the photo niche now. well at least i'm turning this account and related follows in that direction.

posting women and portraits, all original that i've taken, but it's pretty dead. then again i'm also at the extreme opposite end of you, and just started growing this 2 weeks ago... only at 400 followers so it's no comparison to yours, but maybe it's the niche being over saturated?

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Ya I changed my account direction probably twice (artist mind), but I finally am headed in a solid direction, I mean I just posted so the engagement is still low but seems to be a little better. Trying to focus on nature and portraits in nature so ya. And ya I'm sure you have time since you just started! Keep it up!

Problem is the account is 2-3 years old, was private for a long time because it was just my personal account, didnt really care for IG much. Now I'm realizing the potential... unfortunately too late maybe. Don't want to start over with a new account... or have enough content to start from scratch, so yeah, I'll keep it up and cross my fingers, toes ... and uhh, I think thats all i can cross.

brewsh said:

Problem is the account is 2-3 years old, was private for a long time because it was just my personal account, didnt really care for IG much. Now I'm realizing the potential... unfortunately too late maybe. Don't want to start over with a new account... or have enough content to start from scratch, so yeah, I'll keep it up and cross my fingers, toes ... and uhh, I think thats all i can cross.

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You could cross your eyes too! Haha, ah man that's tough. Like I'm really really tempted just start over, like it drives me crazy honestly...I had started another account and I hit the explore page 2 times with it and I only had 1000 followers...and I was getting about 200+ likes and 15ish comments...so I'm tempted just to start over and give up on the big account and just let it grow naturally. I think my account is flagged from botting or something.

I wonder if that happens, wish we had more insight into those sorts of things. Hitting explore is probably the biggest thing for an account in terms of followers i bet. How do you know if you hit it btw?

Funny that you mention like numbers, I think my numbers are pretty high... getting 90-130 per photo with only 400 followers, but it's not resulting in followers... so either the people are highly targeted or my tags are hitting someones feed.

brewsh said:

I wonder if that happens, wish we had more insight into those sorts of things. Hitting explore is probably the biggest thing for an account in terms of followers i bet. How do you know if you hit it btw?

Funny that you mention like numbers, I think my numbers are pretty high... getting 90-130 per photo with only 400 followers, but it's not resulting in followers... so either the people are highly targeted or my tags are hitting someones feed.

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I do too! And I used 60 hashtags that were in the millions, and I ranked in the top 9 in about 40 of them, and I literally even after having the photo up was getting about 40 likes every 20 minutes and tons of followers. I even ranked #1 on the #Models hashtag, the engagement on that photo was really high.

Ya I think yours or high too! Ya I don't get any followers naturally, I recently commented on a big photographers account and he responded and that sent over about 10 followers...but besides that...nothing.

In contrary what all others say, just start over. It's just 12k and your account might/is probably flagged because of botting activity.

You can try to engage with your audience whatever you want, but as long they DON'T see your post, it doesn't help.

Not worth all the effort and stress.

brewsh said:

I wonder if that happens, wish we had more insight into those sorts of things. Hitting explore is probably the biggest thing for an account in terms of followers i bet. How do you know if you hit it btw?

Funny that you mention like numbers, I think my numbers are pretty high... getting 90-130 per photo with only 400 followers, but it's not resulting in followers... so either the people are highly targeted or my tags are hitting someones feed.

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It's cuz you're posting with hashtags - most of those likes are from bots set up to like photos from the hashtags. If they do follow, they will probably unfollow you. No such thing as "oversaturated" at least in the niche I'm familiar with (photography). If you are good and you can get your content in front of people, they will follow you.

I'm kind of in the same boat, I have a 12k personal photography account that I used to bot. My engagement is 300 likes at worst and 1k at best, I found content quality to be the biggest modifier in this in terms of engagement in the new algo era. Average hobbyist photography IS saturated, you have to be your own worst critic and go for mass appeal, verticals, crushed blacks, feet dangling on top of the space station, sunsets/blue hour, bewbs, etc. Or just be really good, so good that the masses can also recognize your work as good.

I know I'm not the #1 photographer in the world, yet, but I've seen a lot of photographers trying to grow their personal pages wondering why it's not working when they really overrate their own work. Or even if it's good, photography is subjective and mass appeal is a lot different than what critics would call good photography.

I have an eyem page where I post a lot more content, then only post the best engaged ones from there on my IG page.

It's a lot easier to grow a "hub" or a community page where you feature other's best work over growing an original personal account. With a hub you can claim a hashtag and ask people to tag you, do giveaways, ask people to tag their friends "who would have good content to feature" and generally be seen as an authority, stuff like that doesn't really work with a personal account.

Shoutouts don't really bring much results, but there you can test your content quality on a big page against all the other posts. If it gets above average engagement on that page, you might be on to something. If not, optimize your content first.