Instagram Limits and Strategies update 2018
This is an update to a previous entry about Instagram follow limits and how to moderate your activities in order to avoid getting blocked from performing certain activities (following, liking, Commenting & DM-ing) or even avoid the ‘banhammer’. We are going to do a summary of what’s explained in the previous post and add what we’ve learned since the last update.
Update 30/07/2018
Key areas we’re going to cover include:
- Follow Limit
- Unfollow Limit
- Instagram like limits
- Instagram comments limit
- How to ‘warm up’ new Instagram accounts.
Apart from the main themes, we’re also going to touch on Instagram automation and monetization.
With that said, let’s get started with our first pointer.
How many people can you follow on Instagram?
Image Credit: BoredPanda
We attempted to answer this question previously. Things haven’t changed much since but I believe we need a new approach when setting our following limit.
What’s important to note here is that there are no universal follow limits for Instagram, a lot of factors come to play here. I’ll mention a few important ones:
- Age of Instagram account
- Size – Number of followers
- Overall engagement (commenting, liking)
- Active/inactive accounts
- Quality of proxies (If you’re automating your Instagram growth)
among others.
Simply stated: aged Instagram accounts (~3months +) are able to follow more people on Instagram than new accounts; accounts with a lot of followers can follow more than those with a few followers; active accounts that also have great engagement also tend to be allowed to follow more than dormant accounts. And if you’re auto-following on Instagram, using a tool like Jarvee, you want to make sure you’re using good proxies.
So, how many people can you follow on Instagram per day?
I set my follow limit for new Instagram accounts at 50 – 80 the first day. I will then increase that number by around 10-20 every new day until I reach a maximum of 500/day for that account. This is the process of safely warming up new Instagram accounts and unless you’re using flagged keywords in your Instagram bio or post captions, you shouldn’t experience any problems.
It is indeed very possible to go beyond 800/day when your numbers grow but I prefer to avoid reaching limits when my accounts would get temporary bans. Some people will even do 1000 follows/day but at some point, they would begin to experience a lot of follow blocks and even huge drops in engagement.
Now let’s break that further down.
Assuming you’re manually following people on Instagram and you spread your activity across 16hrs, by the time your new Instagram account is fully warmed up you’ll be following 32 people per hour or following a user every 2 minutes. I will go on and say it’s safe to follow up to 40 people per hour.
The same formula works for older accounts as well.
Related:
- Social Media Automation: Instagram follow settings
- Auto-unfollow settings (Social Media Automation)
- Auto-Like settings to boost engagement
How many people per day can you unfollow on Instagram?
Unfollowing on Instagram works the same way as following. The real question is, when do you unfollow?
Should you unfollow 1, 2, 3 .. 5 days after following?
Should you unfollow at the same time while following other users or should you set days when you’re only following and specific days to unfollow?
Well, I prefer to wait at least 3 days before unfollowing someone. This allows them time to see the notification that you followed them and have the opportunity to follow you back.
You might be wondering how I’m able to tell who followed me back and who didn’t. Well, actually I automate all my Instagram activities on Jarvee and that’s how I’m able to tell.
I also unfollow the same day as I follow other users.
Instagram like limits
How many posts can you like on Instagram per day?
The general consensus from the people I talk to and a bit of my own experience is, you can safely like per day up to 1.5x the amount of follows you do. Say, for instance, your follow limit is 400/day, that allows you up to 600 likes per day. Keep in mind that these are by no means any official figures but simple estimates we’ve made from our own experiences.
In my case, what I do is, I set Jarvee to like 1-3 posts of a user immediately after following them. This helps to increase the follow-back rate.
Instagram Comments Limits
Personally, I’ve never had to write so many comments to the extent that Instagram stopped me from doing more, but I’ve spoken to many people that are more aggressive with their strategies on Instagram and they agree that a maximum of 250/day would be safe.
Since we’ve already covered new Instagram accounts and how to ‘warm them up’, we should talk a bit about the follow/unfollow approach.
Automating Your Instagram Growth
For many of us, following up to 800/day, unfollowing another couple hundred, liking and commenting can prove too hard a task to do manually. Now imagine doing that every day. And what if you have more than one Instagram account to manage? It becomes almost impossible.
That’s where Jarvee comes in. With Jarvee, you can set it up to do all the tasks you’d otherwise have had to do manually. It frees you up so that you can have time to focus on other equally important areas of your business.
This morning so far: followed 118 and unfollowed 93. Total ‘Follows’: 50130; Total ‘Unfollows’: 51805. So glad I didn’t have to do all that manually!
Jarvee automates a variety of social media accounts including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Plus and they recently expanded to include Tumblr and YouTube! You can do so much more (scheduling + auto-posting, targeting, e.t.c) across all these platforms.
If you’re managing several Instagram accounts or you’re on such a tight schedule and couldn’t afford so much time to work on your account(s), Jarvee is definitely what you need in order to have some peace of mind and have enough time to source for more and better content for your Instagram page.
They have a 5-day money back trial period and they don’t even ask for your credit card, so, you might want to check it out now. It is quite easy to set up but in case you’re unsure of anything, feel free to leave us a comment below and we’ll be able to assist you.
We’ll leave it here until the next update.
See you on the next Instagram limits update!
- Why you shouldn’t buy Instagram followers.
