Avoid These 10 Social Media “No No’s” (Or Get Shadowbanned) ❌

These have either been tested or explicitly mentioned by Instagram as things to NOT do.

My goal is to keep each short and concise.

Comment if you’ve been doing any of these 👀

1. 🤑 Buying followers/views/engagement

This is a given. Buying fake followers/views/engagement doesn’t help your brand in any way, shape, or form.. It’s easy to spot. Plus it really screws with your account long term if you hope to do anything besides have vanity metrics.

2. 👯‍♀️👯 Engagement groups

Engagement groups were all the rage a few years ago. People would create groups where everyone involved would immediately go like/comment on new posts. Instagram cracked down on this and has explicitly said this will hurt your page.

3. 🙏🏻 Constantly asking for likes/followers.

At the end of the day you want people to like/follow you because your content is GOOD. Not because you guilted them into liking it. As much as you want the numbers to grow – it’s better if they grow because the content is good. Rather than having your friend follow from all 3 of their accounts.

4. ♾️ Don’t collab your accounts for no reason

If you have multiple accounts that are NOT related – do NOT collab every single post with them. It ends up hurting your overall engagement. If people wanted to see what’s on your other account – they would follow it.

5. 📝 Half ass descriptions

Instagram uses your description to determine what the post is about. If your description sucks – you leave it to the robots to decide what audience your post gets in front of. Be specific and actually make good descriptions.

6. 📸 Posting with no value add

If every post is just to post – more than likely it won’t accomplish the goals you were hoping. You need a clear audience and goals.

*Want help defining your audience and value? Check it my group: Massive Action Takers

7. #️⃣ Using the same hashtags over and over

It’s clear that hashtags aren’t very useful anymore. They don’t help reach more people, they just help categorize your content. So only use hashtags that pertain to the content you posted. Also, they aren’t necessary.

8. 🫣 Ignoring comments

The CEO of Instagram has come out and said responding to comments HELPS. So if you get comments – respond to them and start a conversation.

9. 🎵 Not using trending music

Using the same music as everyone is annoying as heck. However, you can usually find trending audio that isn’t being used AS MUCH. Use it. It helps overall reach.

10. 💦 Uploading videos with watermarks

It is 2025. There is 0 reason to have watermarks on videos – its literally free to cut them out of popular editing apps. CEO of instagram said videos with watermarks get less reach.

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