How did I lose my U.S. reach on Instagram, and can I reverse it?

hi everyone,

A few months ago I created a new Instagram account and did everything to target an English-speaking audience, mainly US, Canada, and the UK.

I followed about 20 US-based accounts in my niche, engaged a lot with similar content, used English-only captions and hashtags, and it worked. For the first few months, most of my reach and new followers came from the US and Canada.
Some of my Reels even went a bit viral, reinforcing the reach.


However, I made the mistake (maybe?) of having a DM conversation with a creator from my country of residence. Since then, I’ve noticed a sharp shift fewer US followers and a lot more from my home country.


Now I’m wondering
• Did that single DM affect the algo or geotargeting
• Is this just a natural drift in Instagram’s algorithm
• Can I naturally reverse the trend and re-target the US and Canada, or do I now need to use something like SIM plus proxy
• Or is it better to just start a new account from scratch


Would love any advice from others who’ve been through this

dms are just one of many factors that determine your reach but single dm won't influence that much, probably happened because of your ip and geolocation? well it is reversible but it needs consistent effort, just keep doing what you have been doing till now. and did that happened to all those 20 accounts or just the one you dmed from?

kaalemat said:

dms are just one of many factors that determine your reach but single dm won't influence that much, probably happened because of your ip and geolocation? well it is reversible but it needs consistent effort, just keep doing what you have been doing till now. and did that happened to all those 20 accounts or just the one you died from?

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I followed 20 usa content creators, thats what I mean.
I exchanged quit a good amount of dm but with the same person
Why it worked at the beggening ? its weird

metalgear01 said:

I followed 20 usa content creators, thats what I mean.
I exchanged quit a good amount of dm but with the same person
Why it worked at the beggening ? its weird

Click to expand...

then its fine Instagram does naturally drift sometimes, just keep doing what you have been doing and you will be on track before you know it. and use us based keywords

A single Dm shouldn't have a significant impact, however, what we noticed is that our procedure of targeting the US is similar to yours. That being said, just repeat the initial warmup you did and it should be fine.

ToyBox | IG Accounts said:

A single Dm shouldn't have a significant impact, however, what we noticed is that our procedure of targeting the US is similar to yours. That being said, just repeat the initial warmup you did and it should be fine.

Click to expand...

Interesting. Do you think I should unfollow some accounts? I’ve followed around 120 people from various countries since then. Maybe I should go back to only following the 20 U.S. accounts I started with?

Yeah, that's a common-ish issue for geo-targeted IG growth. Per point, I highly doubt one DM caused the shift, not on its own at least. IG does weigh patterns of user behaviour and not just content, so if the DM led to mutual follows, local engagement, or other profile interactions, it could well have contributed to IG reevaluating your account presence. I suppose that could gradually shift your content distribution more locally but that's just conjecture.
Is it reversible naturally? Sure, but it's going to take a quite a bit of time and you'd have to be consistent about your engagements, hashtags, limiting interactions with non-targets, that sort of thing. You could also use a mobile proxy to appear as a US-based connection, would help quite a bit.
SIM and proxy? Useful, if you're planning a more aggressive approach through tools or for multiple accounts. For organic growth, I don't suppose it's required necessarily unless you're running actions via emulators or apps where SIM, IP, and device fingerprinting plays a bigger role. TBH, I'd avoid running through emulators as much as possible though.
Lastly, if your current account still gets some traction, I'd say keep it. Starting over is a good last resort once you've exhausted all other options or unless your engagements and audience quality has totally cratered. Harder to build authority quickly from the ground up after all, so if you're still getting some decent enough reach, it's still worth saving.

The main issue lies in the proxy location, device info location, and the location containing the content you view, daily activities on that account, the language of the content you usually interact with...

Although I have never encountered a case where DM affects the target of the account, I do not completely deny it, it's just that it is too minor compared to the factors of device, behavior, and proxy.

In this case, I think you should focus on checking the device to see if there is any leak of information related to your real location. Additionally, even if you find and fix it, it usually takes up to 2 weeks for Instagram to gradually readjust the target.