Engagement issues

Hello everyone!
It's been a while now that I've been reading a lot of threads on the forum everyday and I've finally decided to post now.

I'm facing quite an issue with my instagram. It is in the photography niche, I'm a photographer and post portraits and landscapes. My pictures are taken with good lenses and a DSLR, the quality is not really the issue here.

I've started my photography instagram back in november 2016. I was totally new to instagram and wanted to build an audience. All I've been doing since is leaving likes, comments and doing follow/unfollow. The followback ratio is not really bad, I get ~175 followers a day, but my main issue is the engagement. In fact, I have now 15.1K followers, and I post daily. Each of my pics gets ~400-470 likes + ~10 comments. It's been the same amount since like, 6K? It hasn't moved since even tho I've been growing my followers.
But ghost followers don't help me, but problem is, I really can't afford shoutouts or followliker or that kind of stuff.

So I'd like to ask you for help, how can I help my engagement rate? I feel really bad right now and I'd really love to see it grow a bit. I've read all these things about hashtags, quality photos, posting daily and interracting with people and I'm doing it. I've tried engagement groups but most were too big and liking manually every single person took so much time !

So is there any way I could grow well please? Any help would be really appreciated, thank you so much in advance.

Bump ^

Could you help me please? I'm really desperate tbh..
I tried engagement groups, but it doesn't seem to change anything.

Are you using hashtags? Have you checked if you are shadow banned perhaps?

Most likely you are ghost banned or IG is purposly throtteling you. In that case you can do nothing.

Lukking said:

Most likely you are ghost banned or IG is purposly throtteling you. In that case you can do nothing.

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Has no one made it back from a throttled account? Even if you stop botting for a few months?

I do use hashtags and my posts with hashtags get lots of likes/comments more than the posts without, that means I'm not Ghosted, right?

willteasle said:

Has no one made it back from a throttled account? Even if you stop botting for a few months?

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I have made it back from ghosted account. Shadow ban is a result of excessive usage of hashtags. Instagram is considering that you are spamming.

Tahaga said:

I do use hashtags and my posts with hashtags get lots of likes/comments more than the posts without, that means I'm not Ghosted, right?

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Well, if you use hashtags, the people who are visiting that hashtag in the explore will see your post. If you don't use hashtags, then you limit the exposure of the posts just to your followers.

You can check if you are ghosted if you post a pic that has hashtags in it and then check that hashtag from an account that is not following the main one and see if the photo appears in the hashtag/s that you have used.

It does appear... So I suppose I'm not ghosted.
But why doesn't my engagement grow then? I honnestly don't understand it...

Tahaga said:

It does appear... So I suppose I'm not ghosted.
But why doesn't my engagement grow then? I honnestly don't understand it...

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Well, I can think of just that the content is not engaging the followers to like, comment etc.

Professor88 said:

I have made it back from ghosted account. Shadow ban is a result of excessive usage of hashtags. Instagram is considering that you are spamming.



Well, if you use hashtags, the people who are visiting that hashtag in the explore will see your post. If you don't use hashtags, then you limit the exposure of the posts just to your followers.

You can check if you are ghosted if you post a pic that has hashtags in it and then check that hashtag from an account that is not following the main one and see if the photo appears in the hashtag/s that you have used.

Click to expand...

Ok I am going to try lay off the hashtags for a few weeks see if my engagement goes up!

Can I PM you professor please, to see if it's really the issue? Because I'm actually posting quality pictures..

Tahaga said:

Can I PM you professor please, to see if it's really the issue? Because I'm actually posting quality pictures..

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Yeah, sure.

I actually can't send PMs sorry, can you send me one please?