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Permanently Tainted IG Account?
In the folly of my youth, but for a good cause, I started botting an IG account 6 years ago, for about a year. It was for a local, charitable organization that hosted free events. Something I started as a social entrepreneurship project in school. I got it up to 20k followers, with 98% of them local to my city, random samplings all showed real people, lots of private accounts, ect. but my engagement was always shit and it was really embarrassing having that many followers with only 100 likes and 5 comments. I abandoned it, along with my organization once I get busy with life/work.
Fast forward to now, I have a new, relevant idea and I’m not sure if I should leave that old IG account six feet under and start a new organically or try and resuscitate it, organically.
It was never banned, but I’m wondering if it that account carries at stigma for eternity. I’m theorizing that my audience is just very general and difficult to engage with niche content, and that’s the only issue but I don’t know.
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9 Replies
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Start a new account.
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Just start a new one buddy
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Start a new account. If this new idea attracts brands, businesses and sponsors, the engagement would shoo them away. Not to mention Instagram sniffs out bot accounts eventually.
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Depending on what you’d be doing with it/your goal, why not try and revive with a timeline. Start a new account and double post for a few weeks, if engagement comes back, great you’ve got a huge head start. If not, great you already started a new account the right way.
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Digital Marketer, agency-side here. Depends on your objectives. What is it exactly that you’re trying to achieve?
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I say try and revive it. You already have the account. As someone else mentioned here already you can double post too and roll with whichever account gains more traction.
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Personally, I’d definitely revive the old account. Getting started is the hardest part, and with a 15k account to jump in with you have a big advantage in making those brands you want to work with think you are legit and having potential new followers perceive your account as an industry authority.
Engagement comes down to a LOT of factors, and some of it is just genre of content, how you use or don’t use hashtags, etc. The algorithm is just one piece of why a post might get the level of engagement it gets.
If you restart it, though, archive- don’t delete- old posts, and archive them in batches of 4-6. Totally setting fire.to all your old content to restart can be a red flag to IG.
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If this is a “new relevant idea” rather than the original idea that attracted subscribers years ago, the “new idea” is implicitly not what they signed up for. It’d feel like spam to me, which is not a first impression I’d want to make. It’s also a false impression of the 20k that’s driving the desire to resurrect the old account since they don’t actually represent your current supporters. 20k with zero engagement might as well be 200k with zero engagement – they still amount to zero engagement.
Someone else recommended double posting. I agree. If the targets are similar enough, it seems fine to post in a new account and share/recommend in the old account. If this drives re-engagement, good, if not, you have already started the new account. Maybe you can periodically send another share/recommend on the old account, but I’d limit the use.
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New account. It may be tempting to leverage this old one, but ultimately you will be better off with a fresh start. Botting behavior aside, the engagement rate would be worrisome for potential partnerships, sponsorships, collaborations, etc.
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