E380: Many of the top social media algorithms got their fundamentals from Google’s algorithms.
Instagram is no different.
Attributes that are important to Instagram are shared by Google, X, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and more.
In this episode of the show, I break down trust attributes for Instagram’s algorithm and relate that to Google, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and X.
Understanding what’s valuable to one algorithm helps you understand the rest of them, helping you consistently achieve great organic results.
Link to the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/InstagramMarketing/comments/d8s6zb/how_to_avoid_action_block_on_instagram_action/
00:00 Mastering Social Media Algorithms 01:09 Today's Episode 01:28 What Are Instagram Action Blocks 03:41 Attributes Influencing Action Blocks 04:13 Account Age and Authority 06:38 IP Address and Previous Violations 09:12 Third-Party Tools and Account Health 12:12 Activity Level and Random Variance 15:28 Final Thoughts
#instagramtips #socialmediamarketing #socialmediamanager #digitalmarketing
The Edward Show. Your daily digital marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
When I learned how to do a search engine optimization, I studied the Google algorithm so much deep into the night, many nights in a row. When I started on TikTok on November 1st, 2022, I did the same thing with TikTok. When I started growing on Instagram, I did the same thing with Instagram. And the thing about social media algorithms or the Google algorithms is that a lot of these platforms, they share attributes, attributes like age, like activity level. They share them in common, if you know how one platform works, if you know how Google's algorithm works, for example, you have a much better understanding, just intuitively of how Instagram's algorithm works, or how TikTok's algorithm works. I think one of the reasons that I'm so good at social media, and I think I'm pretty good at it, actually, I'm not the biggest account, but I have a pretty loyal fan base, and I'm growing at a very healthy amount without doing that much work. And I think one of the reasons for that is because I understand how these algorithms work on Instagram, on TikTok, I understand how these algorithms work. And the reason for that is because I've been doing search engine optimization for decades, and I really looked closely at how the Google algorithm works. So on today's episode of the podcast, this episode 380 of my daily digital marketing show, I do this thing every day, seven days a week, no matter where I am. Today, I happen to be in the backyard of a luxury hotel here in the European city that I'm in, with lots of people walking around behind me, lots of commotion. On today's episode of the show, I'm going to read, I think, a totally underrated thread that I found on the Instagram marketing subreddit, it's called How to Avoid Action Block on Instagram, Action Block Triggers. And I skimmed this, I look through it pretty closely. It's completely worth it. I'm going to comment on a lot of the attributes that this post says, because this post, it shares these attributes for Instagram, things that are important for the Instagram algorithm. It mentions these attributes, but a lot of these attributes, they're shared on TikTok, they're shared on Google, they're shared everywhere. They're shared on X, they're shared everywhere. If you want to make a trusted website or a trusted social media account, and be able to say more things that are more racy, or be able to get away with more, send more DMs to people, or just simply reduce the chances that your account is like mysteriously banned or blocked or suppressed, that just happened to a friend. Literally, the reason that I'm recording this is because my friend was mistakenly reported for buying followers on Instagram. He didn't buy any followers, but he didn't have a super trusted account. And that had me looking into how do you make a trusted account on Instagram? And when I found this post, I realized why I have not had any problems with my Instagram, why I have not really had any problems with my TikTok, why I haven't had problems with my websites, and it's because I know these things that I'm going to share with you. So that's what this episode is. So the post starts says, I promise that I will make a post about this. So here we go. This is from euphoria KG on the Instagram marketing subreddit. And this user says, you are probably aware that since June 2019, Instagram really started to tighten their rules. This post is from several years ago, but it's still incredibly relevant. I promise you, it's incredibly relevant. You are probably aware that since June 2019, Instagram really started to tighten their rules. And prevent people from spamming and botting. Since I'm a member of a private Skype group dedicated to IG marketing, me and some of my friends from this group did some extensive testing to see what triggers these action blocks right now. And what are the things that can be done to decrease the chances or completely avoid getting action blocked. So let's start with what can trigger the action block. And action block is usually triggered by the number of actions you've been doing per hour and per day on your account. Now, the limit is quite different. And so far, I've figured out it can depend on lots of different things. So let's go over these triggers first. So an action is just any action that you do on Instagram, it's posting a video, it's posting an image, it's sending a DM, it's making comments, it's doing likes. That's what an action is. And you can get blocked from doing these things for a variety of reasons and this is what this post is sharing. All right. So the first one is account age and this is directly related to Google. If you've been doing SEO for a while, you know that the age of a website is important. I actually think that a lot of social media algorithms purposefully copied a ton from the Google algorithm. I mean, Google is a very valuable company for a reason. They created an incredibly efficient algorithm at sourcing reliable and good information and social media algorithm designers learned as much as they could from that algorithm. One of the things that they learned is age. The longer a website has been around, the more it's trusted. That is a tenant of search engine optimization, it's age. Now, there's ways to get around how old a website is. I've seen brand new websites rank for their target keyword within the first week because they went viral or I've seen new websites with low domain authority rank by targeting keywords in their niche that were not competitive. Lots of ways to get around age. I've seen new Instagrams blow up, but generally speaking, age is important. So the more age your account has on Instagram, the more actions you will be able to perform. We've seen big increases in daily actions after the account reaches one month of age, three months of age and 12 months of age. The next one is authority search engine optimization. You have domain authority for a website and increases when you get valuable backlinks. Instagram also has authority. This is what this post says, authority in terms of followers posts and your overall engagement rate. The more followers you have an engagement, you get the more actions you are able to do. One month old accounts with let's say 5,000 followers and good engagement. They have high engagement rates. They're usually able to do more actions than one month old accounts with only 500 followers. Also, you need to have at least several published posts accounts that are empty or that only have one to two posts. You usually get the action block much faster. So you want to get engagement on your posts, you want to be posting, you want to have an aged account. That's a very real thing. And lots of black hat marketing circles, black hat digital marketing circles. You'll see people buying and selling accounts for whether that's TikTok, whether that's Instagram. Now, I'm not advocating this, but this is what happens. Even websites, people want aged websites, they want aged accounts. Age is a very important factor, it's the same on Reddit. Age is a very important factor for the trust of an account. The next one is IP address. Your IP address also plays a role in daily action limits. And we've noticed that accounts which use 4G mobile data while performing actions, usually or 5G usually have the ability to do more daily actions than ones with a home IP address. It also seems that the total amount of accounts you are running from the same IP address, especially if it's a home network play a role in the daily action limit. I've seen that too. I had a friend, he tried to open, I think it was TikTok from his home address, didn't work. I told him to get on 5G and try it, got on 5G and tried it and then it worked. He was able to open an account IP address is super important. My friend who just had this action block, he got the action block because he had a virtual assistant log into his account from their location with their IP address. Or that's what he suspects and it makes total sense. Also, it's the same for Google. Google looks at where the webmaster is in terms of IP address. Google has plenty of ways of knowing this. It has your Chrome data. They literally created Chrome to make Google search more reliable. They have your Google search console data. They have your Google Analytics data. There's so many ways that Google knows what your IP addresses and this is important. Google knows where your website is based. It's not just where the servers are. It's where the webmaster is, where the account was set up from, where the people interested in the website are located. Now, that's not to say that like you can't be in a different country and make landing pages that target people in other countries. I created the best search engine optimization funnel of my life during lock downs when I was living in Ukraine for two years. I lived in Ukraine for two years. I created this crazy SEO funnel which we're targeting enterprise businesses in the United States, schools in the United States, so many Western people. And we have lots of people from all over the world and especially the United States find our landing pages, but with SEO, it is a slight factor and IP address does matter, especially if you are on an IP address that is frequently associated with spam. That's really where the problems lie. Previous violations is the next one on the list. If the account had previous action blocks, action limit decreases. We are not sure how long the account stays flagged from previous violations, but we've also noticed that violations on one account can also affect other accounts that are being used on the same device and IP address. That's what I just said. If the IP address you're on has accounts that have gotten tons of violations. It will be bad for your account only if you're frequently posting from that IP address, but you want to stay away from those IPs usage of third party tools and apps. I've personally seen this and this is what the post says. I've mentioned this before and you probably know this, but using third party tools, apps and bots definitely lowers your account health score. And it's easily detectable by Instagram and not only that this lowers your action limit, it can also be the sole cause of the action blocks. A link in bio accounts with a link in bio usually have lower action limit than accounts without. Personally, I think this is such a small factor because the biggest accounts all have links in their bios. I would ignore this, but it does probably matter more for new accounts. For example, you can't put a link in your bio on TikTok until you have a thousand followers. I had to wait until I got a thousand followers to do it. It took me two months to get a thousand followers. I remember where I was. I remember where I was standing in Warsaw when I passed a thousand followers and I was able to put a link in my bio and I was so excited. The next one is overall account health score. Obviously a lower health score affects your action limit negatively and all the factors that this poster is talking about affect health score. The one after this is the types of actions you are performing, not all actions carry the same amount of weight. DMs and comments carry the most weight after that follows and then unfollows. They they carry less weight, but they also carry a good amount of weight and then likes. So DMs require like the most trust comments are second, then follows, then unfollows, then likes. You know, if you keep unfollowing people because you're doing the follow and follow strategy, that's using up your action limits. A similar way to look at it with search engine optimization is the more trusted your website and the bigger it is, the more engagement your website gets, the higher your crawl budget is and the more your pages are indexed. That's an apt comparison. You probably knew this already, but for example, you can perform more likes per hour and per day than follows comments and DMs. Another thing that increases the chance of getting action blocks is if you are performing the same type of actions without mixing things up. So if you are following every day and only do that and you don't do likes, comments and DMs and so on, you will be more likely to trigger the action blocks. If all you're doing is one action and you're not doing other actions, you'll be seen as a bot and you're going to get blocked type of the account. It seems that business and creator accounts are less likely to get hit with the action block than personal accounts of the same age and authority. Also accounts that are linked to a Facebook page have less chance to trigger the action block than accounts that are not linked. That makes a lot of sense because if it's connected to a Facebook page, then meta is more likely to know like you're a real individual because usually Facebook pages that require some form of human verification more so than Instagram. And finally, business and creator accounts that have to spend money on ads have the lowest ability to trigger the action block. That's interesting. So spending money on ads reduces your chance of triggering a block on your actions and then finally is your activity level and I personally have noticed this with TikTok. So this is what it says, your activity level. It also seems that Instagram is tracking your overall activity level and the time you spend on the app browsing. If you let's say only open Instagram every two hours for one minute to follow a certain amount of people and that's it, your daily action limit decreases dramatically. I've seen this with TikTok. I know people who try to grow accounts on TikTok. And if they're not actually watching videos on TikTok, liking videos on TikTok, commenting on TikTok videos, even for just five minutes a day, their videos will not do as well. I've also noticed that for myself when I take a break from TikTok, but I'm just posting and I'm not engaging with other videos. My videos don't do as well unless they're super viral. The way it works is these platforms will reward you with views. If you are rewarding other accounts and creators with your own views and your own engagement, that's the way that it works unless, you know, you're posting like complete garbage. You'll still get some views, but not a lot. If you're posting complete garbage, it's really important to actually watch videos and like posts and comment on posts on these different social media platforms, Instagram and TikTok, especially. Probably YouTube too. They all have similar algorithms. Activity is the same with SEO, by the way. You want to have a website that is active. You want to be posting on your website. You want to be putting up pages. You want to be putting up posts, articles, updating pages. It's the same with Instagram and TikTok. All right. So the post is ending now. This is the end of the post. There is one more trigger, which I'm going to call a random factor. I am not really sure what that is. If it's something that we've missed or Instagram really does this randomly in order to hide how their algorithm actually works and the exact number of actions you are able to perform. But this is something I've noticed before as well, and it's not just related to action limit, but to other things as well, such as post performance in hashtags. You shouldn't use hashtags, by the way. Talk about that ad nauseam on the show. Don't use hashtag and post performance on the explore page, ranking stories and so on. This relates SEO. This wouldn't really surprise me since I know Google actually has the same thing with their algorithm, which is called random ranking factor, and it does make sense. Since if you add some sort of randomness, it gets much harder to manipulate the algorithm. Google is known to have volatility, it's known to have tons of random variance. And that's just so it's harder to figure out the weights of its algorithm and it's harder to manipulate its algorithm. This is like a known thing from Google. Google has tons of volatility for this reason. Instagram does too. TikTok does too. I've noticed post take really long to get views and others get views immediately. They put these things in so that it's harder to manipulate the algorithm. When you know what can trigger the action block, it's pretty easy to figure out what you can do to avoid it. That is the post. This is how to avoid action blocks on Instagram from euphoria KG on the Instagram marketing subreddit of such a good post. If you want to do any sort of digital marketing, I think it's so important to understand how these algorithms work. Like I said, they share so much in common. So this is episode 380 of my daily digital marketing podcast. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. Hope you got value from this episode. I got value from this episode. I will talk to you again tomorrow, bye now.
