It feels awesome when your Instagram content becomes popular and your follower count rises, doesn’t it? People value your content by sharing and commenting, and your fans are excitedly waiting for upcoming Instagram stories.
But what if your Instagram account suddenly starts losing followers for no reason?
A nightmare! Especially when you’re a business, a service, or an influencer.
Are you stuck with this problem and desperately looking for solutions?
Don’t worry! We’ve evaluated the reasons and suggested actionable tips to get your Instagram followers back!
Reasons for Losing Instagram Followers
Your Account Has Been ‘Shadow Banned’
Shadowban refers to restricting a user’s content without his knowledge. It mainly results if:
- You’ve violated Instagram’s community guidelines such as using bots like Instagress or FollowLiker for automatic user interaction via comments, likes, follows, etc.
- Users have continuously flagged your account or content as inappropriate or you’re leaving racial and insensitive comments.
Instagram has never explicitly admitted shadow banning accounts, but there are a couple of posts related to the issue at hand.
Remedy
Be genuine and avoid all black hat practices when you’re using Instagram. Care for your follower’s expectations and share valuable insights/information to promote more user engagement on Instagram. An authentic Instagram account generates a greater follower count.
You Might Be Over-Promoting
We get bored with someone promoting information in a sales-y manner. The same goes for your Instagram feeds. If you’re a business or service, it’s evident that promotional Instagram content is a part of your marketing strategy.
Keep in mind, that there are certain limits. You will lose your followers if your Instagram feeds are filled with desperate sales advertisements. Even if you aren’t a business or service, posting too much, say 6-7 times a day annoys your followers and they might unfollow you.
Remedy:
Schedule your posts and promote your business or service smartly. Avoid direct call-to-actions and back your claims with examples and case studies. Share inspirational stories on how someone benefitted from your product or service.
For a normal Instagram account, share interesting news, life events, or quotes at regular intervals (4 times per week). This helps your audience remain in touch with you and engages them in your Instagram feeds.
You Are Having a Content Shortage
If you’re an influencer there are chances that sometimes you wonder what to post next. Due to other work commitments, you share the same posts again and again.
Also, if you haven’t been active on Instagram for a long period, your followers might feel they are following an inactive account and thus your follower count may fall.
Such situations suggest you’ve got a content shortage.
Say you’re a dietician and once shared an actionable diet plan that helped thousands lose weight without much effort. They started following you with great interest but with time your Instagram feeds have become monotonous with ‘how-to advice’, they unfollow you.
Remedy:
Check with other Instagram influencers in the same niche. Analyze their Instagram posts and try to implement those ideas in your feeds (Never ever copy-paste!).
As a dietician, share your personal healthy lifestyle snaps, give insights on some nature destinations related to health improvement or a real-life case study of your client overcoming health issues with your diet plan.
Your Captions Aren’t Appealing Audience
If you’re losing followers despite posting consistently, it’s high time to evaluate your Instagram captions. If your images aren’t having relevant, engaging, and attractive captions, they seem boring and with time your followers lose interest in you.
What might be wrong with your Instagram captions?
- You aren’t mentioning the context behind the image. For example, what’s the image about, its importance, etc.
- Your story doesn’t have an emotional element or connection.
- You aren’t involving your followers by posting questions or polls.
- You are not using actionable CTA to leave comments, share ideas, experiences, etc.
Remedy:
“On Instagram, strong imagery is what stops users in their feed. However, captions are what drive engagement,” says Stephanie Cartin, co-CEO at Socialfly, a New York City agency.
Captions play a crucial role in increasing follower count, revenue, and brand awareness. Your followers are looking for genuine content that speaks and connects with them.
Create captions based on your desired outcomes.
- If you expect direct sales, include links, discounts, and benefits.
- If you expect brand awareness, use strong taglines or hashtags.
- For more likes and comments, share a funny post and run a ‘tag a friend’ challenge.
- Tell a story to promote the exchange of thoughts via comments.
You Aren’t Appreciating Your Followers
Let’s face the truth.
If you’ve joined Instagram only for posting great content and nothing else, don’t expect a significant rise in your follower count. If you’re not implementing a personalization element, you’re going to lose followers.
What might be going wrong?
- You aren’t responding to followers’ comments personally.
- You aren’t answering any of their important questions.
- You aren’t following back any of your followers or at least liking or commenting on their feeds.
- You aren’t coming up with new content on your followers’ requests for any particular topic.
Remedy:
It feels nice to be appreciated. If you’re an influencer with a huge fan following, take time and respond to some genuine comments. Take part in important discussions and make them feel valued.
This way you’ll not only retain the existing Instagram followers but also increase new followers because the existing ones will be spreading a positive word about you.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to Instagram, it all boils down to focusing on our goals, our real followers, and what matters to them.
We’ve listed the probable causes behind the sudden drop in Instagram followers and their respective solutions. As the saying goes: ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, it’s now on you to fix those problems at the right time to save yourself from the account bans.
How do you feel about the problems and solutions stated in the article? Share your ideas in the comments.
FAQs
The audience appreciates Instagram content types such as quotes, lifestyle posts, open-ended questions, testimonials, fun facts, brand stories, video content, and feature posts.
Yes, you can use native Instagram features such as professional dashboard, live rooms, remix reels, stories caption stickers, and location stories to freely promote your business/service.
Rarely but yes. If you’re violating their community guidelines repeatedly despite warnings, your account may get banned permanently. Instagram has zero tolerance for spammers, racist posts, and harassment.
