When you think you are doing everything right and you aren’t getting the engagement you should on your social media accounts, it is frustrating. If you haven’t made any significant changes to your account or your posts recently, you may suspect that you have been shadowbanned. In this post, we’ll discuss what a shadowban is and how you can avoid it happening to you.
A shadowban is when a user is muted or blocked on a social media site without being notified. Most of the time, the user can still see their own posts and have no idea that no one else can. Being shadowbanned doesn’t mean you have broken the terms of service and have gotten kicked off the platform, but something you did was brought to the attention of the admin and moderators. This hides your posts from your followers and restricts new followers from finding you.
Although most people agree that social media platforms periodically shadowban accounts, most platforms refuse to confirm it. In fact, they often strongly deny being involved in the practice of shadowbanning. Still, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are three of the platforms that many shadowbans appear to occur on.
Many people who find themselves shadowbanned think there was nothing they did to call for a shadowban. However, this probably isn’t true. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things you may have done accidentally that led to a platform penalizing your account.
While hashtags are the best way to get more organic reach, if used incorrectly, they can actually hurt your account. If you use too many hashtags, irrelevant hashtags, or banned hashtags, you may become shadowbanned. To combat this, you should only use hashtags that are relevant to your industry, location, and photo or video content. Frequently check the hashtags you use in your posts to make sure they aren’t banned. Some hashtags bounce back and forth between being banned and being ok to use, so it is something you will want to do regularly.
Social media admins try to pick up bot accounts. Often, these are accounts that post many comments with the same short phrase like “Nice post!” or “Beautiful.” When you leave a comment on other posts, make sure it is over 5 words. Also, customize it to the post you are commenting on. Leave something worthwhile that clearly shows you meant to leave that comment on this specific post and not just any post out there.
Not too long ago, Instagram changed its terms of use, so now it prefers posts that are shared directly onto the app manually instead of through a scheduler. If you think you may have been shadowbanned and you use a scheduling tool, start posting directly in the app for a while or mix in posts between the ones done through a scheduler. After a while of doing this, you’ll be able to tell whether the scheduling tool was to blame.
To avoid looking like spam to any social media platform’s algorithm, post appropriately to each. For example, Twitter and Pinterest are the main social platforms that want more than one post a day. But if you post three times per day every day on Instagram, your account may be flagged as spam.
