Shadowbanned? Here’s What to Do

Oh my goodness.

You’ve spent so much time, money, and brain power to plan, shoot, and edit a week’s worth of content. Sleep has been lost to content research, and days have been invested into producing the content.

The result?

Creative video ideas that nobody has seen before and that you’re incredibly proud of.

You take the day off to celebrate and schedule your content for the week to post automatically, and you wait in impatient anticipation of how the public will react to not only your content but also your music.

Night falls, and so do you (into the bed). The next thing you know, your phone is buzzing with excitement and you leap out of bed to check the commotion.

You pull your face to your phone while wiping the eye crust from the rest you just got, but your face crinkles in confusion. Scrolling to the bottom of your notification center reveals that your family group chat and work emails were the source of the commotion, not your latest post.

In fact, the post is doing the same as all the other content you just posted last week that you barely put any effort into.

In defeat, you crash back into bed wondering if the time, money, and effort spent on the videos was worth it and if you should cancel the rest of the posts. In your dismay, you rack your brain to learn the source of the failure.

It couldn’t have been the ideas because you spent so long researching and ideating, it couldn’t have been the effort because you spent days shooting, so the only logical solution is that you’ve been

SHADOWBANNED.

Or not.

Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri, shares that Shadowbanning does not exist and that it is in Instagram’s best interest to share your content to relevant people.

Okay. So then why does my content get no views?

The only logical answer is that it isn’t as good as you think it is.

Instagram’s interest from a mission standpoint is to “bring you closer to the things and people you love” and from a business standpoint is to sell ads to users and companies, so it would hurt them to hide content that is shareable.

So if your content isn’t being shared, it must mean that it isn’t shareable.

How do you make your content more shareable? There are three main components:

1. Come from your Core

It is paramount to make content that comes from the core of who you are.

That doesn’t mean you have to spill your deepest and darkest secrets, but it does mean to create music and content that is authentic to who you are as a person.

The reality is that if you have specific likes and interests, there are enough people in the world for you to create a fan base around to make a living. You only need 1,000 of them.

Understand the source of inspiration for your music as it relates to your past, your likes, and your values (collectively, your worldview) and you’ll have a foundation to create content that genuinely connects with people.

2. Target a Specific Audience

Once you’ve got the first step, the second step is easy. You must create content with a specific type of person in mind. How will people know it’s for them and who to share it with if they don’t feel specifically called on by the content? More importantly, how will Instagram’s algorithm know who to show it to if you create vague content?

If you make punk music that talks about the struggles of being in your early 20s in the 2024 economy, then your content should center around things like how expensive food and gas is, how hard it is to get a job, or how going out and having fun is nearly impossible with inflation.

It sounds counterintuitive, but the more specific you get, the easier it will be to come up with ideas.

3. Post Consistently to Gain Traction

If you have the above two things but don’t post long enough for your audience to find you, then you definitely won’t build an audience.

Your content might be the most perfect piece of content, but for one of a million reasons, it might not have reached the right people. If we could post one piece of content to find our audience and become millionaires, we’d all be rich.

Don’t give up just because you’re not seeing immediate results. Take every piece of content as an opportunity to learn what went wrong and you can guarantee that your content will get better over time and reach the audience it's meant to.

To learn how to implement these ideas directly in your own content, book a free call with us and we’ll diagnose what ingredients are missing from your content strategy.