Instagram promotion myths It is unexplainable but still not a fact

Instagram promotion myths. It’s unexplainable but still not a fact

Did you know that some people don’t edit posts, because Instagram lowers priority the way they appear in the newsfeed? Do you know how many hashtags should be under a post not to be blocked by hashtags? And how many posts should you make before Instagram kicks you out of the smart newsfeed?

… But still not a fact. In actual practice there are many people, who follow some ridiculous rules and firmly believe in their benefit. Here is a typical example in some SMM group.

And all hell broke loose. All of them start suggesting specific numbers and instructions. But when you ask, “How did you know?”, comes no answer, or it will be based on their own experience, eventually the topic starter gets booed or the adviser admits, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

As the result people are afraid of shadowban, publish just 7 and a half posts, when the last one is exactly at 7:37 PM and after washing their hands, also pray for smart newsfeed approval and do some other weird things. Sometimes such sacral knowledge is shared by internet influencers, people start panicking all together, strategies get changed and courses like “How to avoid shadowban” are sold.

Let’s pick the wheat from the chaff, talk about the most common myths of Instagram promotion and learn how to take every new “Instagram success story” with criticism.

The biggest and scariest myth is shadowban and how to get rid of it and how not to get it.

People are just crazy about this topic, herein everybody has their own shadowban definition and their own ways how to escape it. Let’s get back to its origins.

Shadowban came to us from West in April of 2017th, when users noticed that some posts stopped appearing in search by hashtags. In fact it was just the beginning of personalized hashtags giveaway legend. This is it.  

But no. Of course people need drama. That’s why a legend about shadowban appeared. Plus this drama was deep. At first shadowban was believed to be connected to hashtags, but later people added there such things like MF/ML, too rare and frequent posting and many other things.  

Of course it’s easier to say that you don’t have coverage and you were cursed by shadowban. Instead of saying no coverage let’s think about why you’re not interesting to anybody.

Just imagine.

Does it have to look something like that? And also this “Increase engaged audience percentage”. How? When you can’t post…

The way it really is:

There is no such thing as shadowban, there was a personalized hashtags giveaway instead, and then everything was changed. There are no proofs it ever existed at all.

In order to quit shadowban you can simply forget about that phenomenon and start looking for the reason of your problems in something more real. For example because you abandoned account promotion on Zengram and that’s why your profile views have decreased.

Myth 2. If you run your account as a personal profile, then you’ll get more coverage than with a business profile.

It’s based on an assumption that business profiles’ owners should pay for ads regularly, that’s why when you announce yourself as business officially, Instagram takes all your coverage.  

There is one more opinion. As long as you don’t show you have money for ads everything is fine. But just with the first promo post your free coverage will be taken away. Because Instagram is smart to spot that you have bread and want to take it instantly.

But we still couldn't get any proofs with numbers and facts from people who think that way.

The way it really is:

We have one question for those who think that way. How do they measure coverage in a business profile and then in a personal profile if statistics is only available for the first one? Of course there are ways to use third-party services and tracking activity by the amount of likes, but both variants are still ambiguous.

Our experiments with switching accounts back and forth didn’t show anything worth noting, especially if you measure it by an average amount of likes.

Myth 3. If I have more followers, then the others will start following me more likely.

There is a tradition to buy robots (ghosts) and increase their amount before promotion. Sometimes people tend to buy accounts with already gathered bots for them.

*Don’t confuse it with buying ready to work accounts for selling something. Such scenario is possible, but we still remind you that it’s FORBIDDEN to sell such accounts by service rules.

So why do people spoil their accounts right from the beginning? It’s believed that account becomes more trusted that way especially with 10k followers. It’s some kind of social proof that it has something interesting to offer and new users will just appear out of nowhere. =)

The way it really is:

Prepaid followers don’t buy anything and are not interested in you in anyhow, they don’t bring new followers. The amount of followers is not not the best criteria for starting following a user.

Actually everything happens this way.

Just watch your actions. What makes you start following an account? You become interested in the amount of followers only when you want to buy something, but…

Firstly, it’s logical to build your relationships with your followers, and then to start selling.

Secondly, there are whether naive users or not so much. The first people buy only with emotions, they are not gonna look at the number of your followers, they will buy anyway, but if the second group notices substitution and fraud then there will be one less follower and a buyer.

It doesn’t mean you won’t get a result if you buy robots (bots) for the first time. But in that case you won’t get a real picture of interest and users’ feedback, because a half of it will be covered by bots, they also take part in total statistics. As the result you won’t be able to analyse results of the work you’ve done and change the future strategy when needed, you simply won't understand that you need to do that.

Sometimes it’s done just for beautiful numbers. Yes you can consider that to be a social proof. Business opponents visit your profile or your ex classmate Peter the one you went to high school together to make them see your outstanding popularity. But of course when you look closer it all fades away and it will be even funny a bit, that’s why just don’t do that. That’s why we recommend our users to regularly clean up an account from bots (robots) with help of Zengram. You can read more about cleaning up benefits for better engagement results here in our ER article.

Myth 4. It hurts your followers coverage when you use a postponed posting service.

This theory has FB roots, where it has a built in scheduler with help of what you can make postponed posts officially, unfortunately such kind of posts really get decreased coverage, since it was pre-planned this kind of information is already considered to be outdated for social networks. There’s logic in there, but Instagram has nothing to do with that.

Somebody said that he had run tests and coverage was really decreasing, but there were also some people who didn’t notice any changes.

The way it really is:

Instagram rules are against using such services, and if you are busted using them expect punishment, plus there is no official way to schedule your posts on Instagram. You can only create drafts and publish them at certain time.

It must be a real myth, because a scheduler just imitates regular posting. And Instagram can’t detect difference between them.

If you think that’s it, then we have some bad news for you (or good news?). People came up with many “rituals” that you’ll be in gods’ favor for doing them. Read more about myths on Instagram. Section about photos and Instagram posting, about hashtags, likes and comments on Instagram.