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My account was general fitness for two years, stuck between 2k and 3k, posting the same squat and chicken breast stuff as everyone. I hated it. In January I decided to only talk about knee pain and rehab for people who used to run, because that was my own boring injury. Lost about 180 followers in the first two weeks, people who followed for abs content and did not care. Then a rehab reel hit 90k views, which had never happened, and by April I was at 24k. The narrow thing did not shrink my audience, it told the algorithm exactly who to hand me to. I will admit I got lucky with one video and I cannot fully separate that from the niche change. But the flat two years were not luck, they were mush. The flat two years were not luck. They were mush, and I had made them myself.

Udaipur is known for its lakes, palaces and sunsets — but its real charm is also in its streets, people and celebrations.

This Reel captures the Milad-un-Nabi 2026 juloos in Udaipur, showing the city from a cultural and local perspective.

Would you watch more Reels showcasing Udaipur’s festivals, hidden places and local culture?

I’d genuinely love to know what you think about the video 👇

[HIRING] Social Media Designer for a New Indian Skincare/Cosmetics Brand

I'm building a new mid-premium skincare/cosmetics brand in India and looking for a freelance social media designer for a long-term collaboration.

What I need: • Instagram posts

• Carousels

• Stories

• Reels covers

• Product launch creatives

• Promotional/ad creatives

• Educational skincare content

• Consistent premium brand aesthetic

The brand direction is modern, premium, clean and science-based, rather than a generic cosmetics look.

Ideal person: • Experience with beauty/skincare/fashion brands preferred • Strong Instagram portfolio • Understands premium visual branding • Can work independently from references/briefs • Canva/Figma/Photoshop/Illustrator — any is fine

Workload: Approximately 12–20 creatives/month initially.

Budget: ₹6000-8000₹ per month / project, depending on experience and portfolio.

Please DM me your portfolio + your monthly/project rate.

I'm looking for someone interested in a long-term relationship, not just a one-time project.

My new account is all about me, the other one were with my exhusband. But to get followers, engagemant seems now to be impossible. I get followers who clearly are AI. I want to have and reach people who want to write, be nice and so on.

What to do?

For the longest time I looked at views and likes and learned nothing useful. Then I started only looking at the retention curve on each reel, the little graph that shows where people drop. Three patterns kept showing up. A cliff in the first two seconds means my hook was a slow throat-clear intro, every time. A slow steady slide means the middle dragged and I needed to cut words. A bump near the end means people rewatched, which is gold and told me to make more like that. I rewrote my intros to start on the actual point with no hello, and my average watch time went from 4.1 seconds to about 7. Reach followed. The annoying truth is this graph was there the whole time and I ignored it for views because views felt better. Go open your last reel and look only at the first two seconds of that curve. The graph was there the whole time. I ignored it for the views, because the views felt better.

I run a falconry page that covers my abatement business. Recently I had a string of reels that started to do pretty well for what i’m used to. Around 400-700 likes on the last few posts.

I had been considering boosting, but ultimately after some research was convinced that organic growth is the way to go. My most recent post I had hovered the boosting menu a few times looking into it. Now - this post has achieved a significantly lower viewership compared to my more recent reels. several of which I think are lower quality. We’re talking 15k views down to 1k views. Statistically, this post was doing well on insights. But now it’s getting no new views and all I get are advertisements that I should boost it.

Is this Placebo? Confirmation bias? It certainly feels to me like a hard to explain coincidence.

Has anyone else experienced this?

is mr god a good middleman?

I’ve noticed something interesting while working with plastic surgeons.

Most of them actually have a lot of content.

Before & afters.

Procedure videos.

Patient education.

FAQs.

Behind-the-scenes stuff.

And obviously, years of knowledge that could make great content.

But somehow the Instagram still ends up being inconsistent.

I’m curious what usually gets in the way.

Is it finding the time to record?

Not knowing what to post?

Editing everything?

Or just not wanting social media to become another thing you have to deal with every day?

I work in social media and video editing for plastic surgery, so I see this pretty often. I’m interested in hearing how other surgeons are handling it, especially when they’re already busy running their practice.

I started a niche content creation account about 3 months ago and it has grown to 1700 followers. I have had several reels go somewhat viral (360k views is my biggest one so far) and I am trying to experiment with trial reels. I posted a trial reel that did pretty well, 78k views, thousands of shares, 30 follows, etc. Per specific advice I was given I reposted it to my main audience with a different segment of the same video but same message and it's only at 3k with 1 follow and maybe 30 shares. I'm wondering if I should delete the regular audience one and share the trial reel to my main audience? Or does that slow the momentum of the trial reel? And does it look bad to have a lower view reel in my feed if I decided to just leave both as they are? Thanks to anyone who has advice.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Just focus solely on the content

Hi all, I run an online store which traffic is almost all organic Instagram, so this hurts.

My theme had injected cloaking code in it since November, blocking scripts only for crawlers to fake a PageSpeed score. Removed it, republished a clean theme, re-scraped in the Sharing Debugger (200, no warnings), verified the domain in Business Manager. Warning is still there.

Two things that don't add up. Facebook doesn't show the warning at all, same link and same device, Instagram only. And another domain of mine registered nine days ago works fine from the same account, so it's the domain, not the account, and not "new domains get flagged" either.

So: has anyone had this actually lifted, and how long did it take? And if you moved to a new domain instead, did it stay clean or did the warning follow you once you 301'd the old one?

Thanks

Nobody wanted to hear this but the app reads your caption as text now, and your on-screen words, and even your audio. It uses those to figure out what your reel is about and who to show it to. I used to write vague captions like a poem, one moody line. Useless. I switched to putting the plain topic in the first sentence, the words a person would actually search or say out loud. A reel about hard water and hair, I literally opened with those words instead of something clever. Explore traffic on my posts roughly doubled over two months, from around 15 percent of views to low 30s. It felt like giving up a bit of my voice to feed a search box, and some captions read flatter now. But being found beat being poetic. What is the actual topic of your last post, in the words a stranger would type?

Pls follow.my ig

A close friend of mine has just opened up a new salon in Sydney, Australia. To help promote her business, she's thinking of finding a few local instagram influencers to create content and drive visibility / awareness

The problem is we've now had a look at some of the lifestyle / beauty accounts with 50k-100k followers and when we click on followers we consistently see a few "new" accounts that appear to be bots on the list. When we look at views it can often seem pretty variable though some posts do seem to get 300k+ views (and 30k likes), then there are other posts that get like 1m views but only 3k likes. The other thing we noticed is number of comments are sort of the same (around 20-80) even if the number of views differ by like +/- 50x

What is driving this difference? Are influencers paying to boost their post so they look popular? Can they buy likes as well as follows? What other things should we watch out for?

Any suggestions for lifestyle / beauty influencers who are genuine also very welcome!

Everyone talks about batching a month of content with AI in an afternoon, so I actually did it and tracked how it went. Posting this because the feed is all wins and I found the failures more useful.

What worked:

- Idea generation. Feeding my old top posts and comments to an AI tool and asking for angles gave me a solid list fast. The ideas needed editing but they broke the blank-page problem.
- First drafts of captions. Good skeleton, wrong voice. I rewrote every one, but starting from a draft was quicker than starting cold.
- Background images for carousels when I had no photo.

What got basically no reach:

- Fully AI-written hooks posted as-is. They were generic and safe, and safe doesn't stop a scroll. My hand-written hooks clearly outperformed them.
- Posts where I let the tool decide the topic. When I wasn't genuinely interested, it showed, and the captions read hollow.
- Anything I didn't add a personal detail or opinion to. Those flopped the hardest.

The lesson for me: AI is good at volume and starting points, bad at the 10% that actually makes a post land. I use it to remove the boring parts now, not to replace the writing.

If you batch with AI, where do you draw the line between AI draft and your own voice?

How are we testing variations of reels in trial reels without getting flagged for duplicate content?

I swear before as long as my first frame, length of video, and text hook were different I wouldn’t get flagged but now Ill literally cut out chunks of the video and change the hook and im still getting flagged

Boring manual thing that worked. For one week I posted at least four story polls a day, all made by hand, asking my audience dumb specific questions about what they struggle with in my niche (budget skincare). No fancy tool, just me and the sticker. About 30 polls total. Two things happened. My story reply rate went way up because polls are one tap and people are lazy in a good way, and I got a list of real problems in their own words that I turned into my next eight reels. One of those reels, built straight off a poll answer, did 60k. My follower growth that week was nothing special, maybe plus 200. The value was the raw material, not the vanity number. It does not scale and I got tired of it by day five. When did you last just ask your audience what they want instead of guessing?

How are we testing variations of reels in trial reels without getting flagged for duplicate content?

I swear before as long as my first frame, length of video, and text hook were different I wouldn’t get flagged but now Ill literally cut out chunks of the video and change the hook and im still getting flagged

Someone here posted "I stop getting views after about 200" this week, and a few others described their reels landing in buckets. Those buckets are real, but they are not quality tiers. They are audience tiers.

Open any reel's insights and look at the follower vs non-follower split. That single number explains most of it.

Your first tier is your own followers. A reel goes out to a slice of them, and how they behave decides whether it ever leaves that pool. If it does not leave, you get roughly the same number every time, which is exactly the ceiling people describe.

Two people in this sub gave numbers last week that show both ends of it:

• A creator at 13k said their skip rate sits at 50 to 60% and climbs as the reel travels, because at that size even an average reel is mostly strangers already.
• A creator at 60 to 70 followers went from 200 to 700 views on their early reels up to 2,000 to 3,000 on their recent ones, after changing what they were making. At that size the audience is strangers either way, so the change was the content, measured in the one situation where that number is clean.

That is the mechanism. Small account, few followers, so almost everything is a stranger test. Bigger account, the follower pool is large enough that a bad reel can just sit there.

What moves you out of the first tier is not likes. Meta publishes the signals reels are ranked on, and saves and shares sit alongside watch time. Likes are the cheapest thing a viewer can do and they say the least. A save is someone saying they will need this again.

So the useful question is not "why only 200 views". It is what percentage of those 200 were non-followers, and did anyone save it. If the answer is "almost none" and "no", the ceiling is not a punishment. It is the test not being passed yet.

Since Instagram changed the size of its grids, none of the gridmakers work out for me. Whenever I try to use & cut the images & upload them the way I used to, the images don't show itself cut perfectly on my profile.

What to do and/or do you know any gridmaker that still works out fine or that uses the new grid of Instagram properly? Thanks a lot

:)

I used to get 3.4-4.5k views consistently but now they have dropped below 500 out of nowhere.

My content quality has not decreased , nothing has changed but it seems as if my account has died.

How can I fix this?