The Instagram penalty box is one that just surrounds a profile without warning!
It happened with one of our profiles –
One of our managed cannabis profiles took a hit and now we’re 14 days in the penalty box.
How did we get out of it?
We spent our time, we kept on; keeping on.
We treated our time in the penalty box as if we were still playing the game and not in it at all. This resulted in slower momentum than we like. We still produced original content for images and stories, in fact, go check it out for yourself @cannabis_wallet.
Regardless of our hashtag shadow ban, we still did LIVE Instagram scenes were created as a convention happened during it.
The question of privacy versus marketing continues to rage on.
Just like we do on the daily, we continued to follow/like/content other content in our feed and engaged on DMs, our overall plan remained the same during the 14 day period, setting up ourselves for success.
Now, there were frustrations along the way when it came to follows. It was at the 5K mark we noticed, which coincidentally occurred around April 20th, the birthday of cannabis, 4/20. It happened after Instagram asked for additional security to login after a forced logout, that was a close to warning as we got. Its more difficult to grow our profile follows during this period some days were higher than others as likes and comments allowed the cannabis profile to continue to engage, which Instagram wants to see that we are still a profile that wants to tell their story for our target audience to see.
Unlike a typical business profile, cannabis profiles are tolerated on Instagram and get shutdown without warning, along with not able to promote any posts, as its in Instagram violation. Our approach to continue to still our story paid off as we’re seeing that after two weeks, hashtags are starting to appear in our Insights.
Instagram wants to see that we are still a profile that wants to tell their story to our target audience.
What did we learn from the penalty box, is that our storytelling stayed on point, are follows continue to rise and our engagement held strong in spite of a small base to work with.
What’s your tale with Instagram? Slide into the DMs at @cannabis_wallet or get in touch with them cannabiswallet.net