How to Avoid Getting Banned on Instagram in 2021 and beyond

How to Avoid Getting Banned on Instagram?

Instagram is not how it used to be when it was started. Back then, you could do pretty much everything you thought could help grow your account, including using bots and tools.

However, it has transformed into something completely different now, becoming one of the stringent social media platforms.

So it’s important to understand how to protect your profile from permanent or temporary ban, or even shadowbanning, which is affecting a lot of users lately.

Without further ado, let’s jump in.

Understanding Shawdowbanning by Instagram

Shadowbanning on Instagram is different from the traditional bans which either ban your account temporarily or permanently. With the latter, you get a notification from Instagram telling you that you have been banned. You can this kind of notification even when your account is deactivated.

However, you don’t get notified in any way when you’re “shawdowbanned” by Instagram. Shadowbanning simply means that Instagram significantly limits your reach when it finds that you’re performing some extreme actions on your account.

The easiest way to find out whether you have been shadowban is to check your reach and engagement rates. If there’s a steep decrease, then it’s very likely you may have been shadowbanned.

A shadowban also prevents you from using any hashtags in your posts, so you may want to look into that as well if you suspect a shadowban on your account.

Ways to Avoid Getting Banned on Instagram

Now that you know a fairly unique type of ban recently introduced by Instagram in the form of shadowbanning, let us walk you through the steps you can take to avoid all types of bans on Instagram.

Stay Off Bots

What many users do is employ auto-follow tools and bots to automatically follow a particular set of users in an aggressive manner. This often triggers Instagram’s follow limits, which many times results in a temporarily block on your profile.

This means that you’re prevented from performing any actions like liking, commenting, following or direct messaging anyone.

A good way to get a good start on Instagram without using bots is to simply buy a good number of Instagram followers. It would not only make your profile more trustworthy in the eyes of your target audience, but it may also help you get a wider reach, which may end up having a snowballing effect for your profile and gaining followers.

Avoid Mass Following or Unfollowing

Following targeted users in your niche to grow your followers and then unfollowing the users who don’t follow you back (to get the followers to following ratio in check) is a common and effective way to grow your follower base on Instagram.

However, this doesn’t mean you can follow or unfollow users as much as you want. If you overdo it, you will come off as suspicious or “spammy” to Instagram, and your account may be limited or blocked for a particular period of time. Similarly, you may also be prevented from performing certain actions for a few days or weeks.

Image credits: TemplateMonster

Instagram is particularly stringent on newer accounts, so avoid mass following or unfollowing actions if your account is new.

While Instagram doesn’t officially reveal anything about these limits, it’s generally believed that you shouldn’t follow, like or direct message more than 60 times an hour. However, these numbers are much lower for newer accounts, and are believed to be half of the limits as for the more aged accounts.

Don’t Get Tempted to Share Viral Posts

It’s tempting to share images and videos that you think might go viral without really understanding whether they meet Instagram’s requirements. Many times, the posts that you share in the hope of going viral violate Instagram’s policies, and they can get your account in trouble.

This is especially true if these posts are reported by users, which will instantly bring them to the attention of Instagram moderators.

Anything that’s related to sexuality, violence or hate speech is a big no. You may also want to note that just because some image or video has gone viral on some other social platform and they didn’t take it down, doesn’t mean Instagram will be as kind to it as well.

Every social platform has a different set of rules and policies concerning the content on their platform, and Instagram is definitely one of the strictest ones out there.

Instead, you can try and make some of your best posts go viral. Buying high-quality Instagram likes is a great way to make Instagram give more exposure to those posts, while encouraging other real users to like it as well.

Don’t Share “Hurtful” Content

Now this one might sound a little vague, but if you share a post that’s hurtful towards a particular set of people it might not go too well with Instagram, even if it doesn’t clearly or directly violates its policies.

The thing is, if enough people report your post as hurtful, abusive or for some other similar reason, then it’s likely to get taken down by Instagram. However, Instagram won’t ban or even restrict your account in most cases if it happens once or twice, but it’s definitely going to get a little serious if you keep doing it over and over.

A good practice here is to keep a watch on the comments your posts are getting. If any of them are getting too many negative comments from a particular set of people, make sure you take it down even if you don’t think it violates Instagram’s policies.

Copyright Infringement Is More Serious Than You Think!

A lot of users simply copy or share other users’ images or videos to their computer only to share them on their profile as their own content. In addition, a large number of users also copy posts from other sources on the internet and directly share it on their profile.

While the former is sure to get you in trouble sooner than you think, you may not stay safe for too long doing the latter too. If anyone reports your post for copyright infringement and it indeed is a copyright infringement, Instagram is going to take it very seriously.

Do it a few times and you might as well kiss your account good-bye forever!

Using Multiple Accounts

While Instagram won’t ban you if you’re managing your business and personal account from the same device, trying to manage more than say 5 accounts from one device or even a single IP address is likely to annoy Instagram enough to send a permanent ban your way on all the accounts in question.

If you DO have to use multiple accounts, make sure you use different devices and IP addresses (different internet connections) to stay under the radar.