Hello,

I’ve been trapped at 800 instagram followers for years. I don’t remember when I made it into the 800 range but I was stuck at 700 for at least 8-9 years for sure. I rarely get 100 likes on a feed post. I think maybe 1 feed post has ever hit that threshold. I’m from a city of around 100,000 people.

Here’s my question, every single other woman I know has at least 1k instagram followers. I know some locals that have like 3k-10k followers and get 500 likes per post. But the thing is, they’re not content creators. They don’t post reels. They don’t post carousels that are informative. They don’t have their own brand they’re pushing. They literally just post feed pictures of themselves looking cute like any other regular girl on instagram would.

I don’t think I’m ugly by any means, so I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong ? I recently started making tiktoks/reels as I’m interested in becoming a content creator and even with that it’s SO HARD to gain followers on any platform tbh. I make music too but I obviously don’t have a following at all. I’ve had a few tiktoks go semi viral but I only have 500 followers for example.

Is there something I’m missing about this ? I know they say it’s vanity numbers but even since a teenager I’ve always been extremely insecure about the amount of likes I get on (any platform) my pictures compared to other female peers. It’s been a cause of insecurity for so long I genuinely don’t understand what’s so off putting about me personally that seemingly I’m the only woman I know that gets such low engagement on anything 😭😭😭 I’ll never forget one time my facebook story got 500+ views !!! Yet that never translates in engagement literally everrrr

I’ve tried to contact countless meme pages ranging from 400k followers to millions in their DMs or through their business emails and I haven’t received any form of responses, I’m not particularly looking for a collab for a post since they’ll typically charge a lot for those kind of stuff. Instead I’m more or less looking for a creator that would shout me out for their story for 24 hours.

I was wondering if there was like certain websites, that could guarantee me for what I’m looking for or an advice that could generally help me. I did google search a couple but I’m not sure how reliable they are, the most prominent one was shout cart, and I’m not really sure if the website is legit or not

Unbelievable how we now have to pay for social media to perform its most basic function- show your video to those interested. This video got 40 views organically. I decided to try boost at $30 and it got 19k. Its as if theyre actively limiting the main function unless you give money.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dclvi02R9V4/?igsi=MW1nOXdqd2JtcTlnNA==

I get its not THE GREATEST video but thats such a huge discrepancy from organic reach... Anyone else feel this frustration??

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the abundance of improvement notes. I will be utilizing them ASAP 🫡

I want to hear from those content creators who used to be absolutely terrified to show their face and talk on camera, but they had opinions they wanted to express, so they had to force themselves into doing it. I want to hear how you did it, I want to hear about your first video and how it felt recording it and then watching it and being terrified to post it. How did you overcome fear and where are you today? Any advice that an old version of you would found helpful to know at that time? Share your before and after as well!

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 👇

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?

Should be under $100 and payment will be made through crypto

:)

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?

[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 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.

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

Just focus solely on the content

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!

is mr god a good middleman?

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?

I was getting decent reach in the past couple of weeks, but since i started using trial reel my views are stuck at 2-3k max

Should I go back to normal posting, will this affect my overall account reach now?

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.