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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 your account in the ‘Instagram jail’ and even avoid the ‘ban hammer’. We are going to do a summary of what’s explained in that post and add what we’ve learnt since the last update.

Key areas we’re going to cover include:

Follow/Unfollow Limits
Instagram like limits
Instagram comments limits
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/unfollow on Instagram at a time?

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 follow/unfollow limits.

What’s important to note here is that there’s no universal follow and unfollow 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

among others.

Simply stated: aged Instagram accounts (~3months +) are able to follow more than new accounts; accounts with a lot of followers can follow more than those with few followers; active accounts that also have great engagement also tend to be allowed to follow more than dormant accounts.

So what’s the best approach you ask?

I set my follow limit for new Instagram accounts at 300 – 350/day for the first week. I then increase that number by between 50 – 70 every other week that follows until I reach a maximum of 800/day for that account.

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.

Now let’s break that further down.

Say if you have a maximum of 5 hours a day to do the follow/unfollow method (assuming you’re doing it manually), and you’re working on a new Instagram account. That would amount to a maximum of 70/hr or 6 every 5 minutes. Those are very safe figures if you asked me.

The same formula works for older accounts as well.

Instagram like limits

The general consensus from the people I talk to and a bit of my own experience is, you can safely like per day upto 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.

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.

Read: Using Hashtags Effectively To Grow Your Instagram Account

If you’re managing several Instagram accounts or you’re on such a tight schedule and wouldn’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.

Read – This Tool Will Grow Your Instagram Account While You Sleep

They have a 5-day money back trial period and 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 and in case you’re wondering how to monetize your account, visit our post about Instagram Limits and find out how to.

See you on the next Instagram limits update!

Update 07.08.2016

I meant to post an update last evening but didn’t get around to doing it.

(Link removed: Update coming soon)

–> Read: How to recover from an Instagram shadowban.

Well, my fashion page hit 20k and I was happy to see it move from 19.9k as I watched. I’m testing a few things and if something worth writing about comes up, I’ll share it in the next update.