Instagram analyses every single action we perform from our accounts. Depending on the quality of these actions, the account trust score can raise or drop.

Simply put, the account trust score (or sometimes it’s referred to as health score) is how Instagram ranks your profile — it’s either trustworthy or spam-like. In the latter case, the account is at risk of getting banned.

There’s no specific or technical way of checking your exact trust score, but if your account often gets blocked or Instagram forbids you to perform some of the actions, your account is interpreted by the social network as bot.

What affects your Instagram trust score?

Some things can lower your trust score on Instagram. If you consider your account to be not trustworthy enough, try to get rid of the below.

Fake followers, comments, and likes

When you post on Instagram, the platform tests your content at first, shows it to only about 10% of your followers, and analyses how your audience engages with it. If the majority of your audience are bots or irrelevant people, they will not engage with your content. It leads to the low ER and affects the trust score. Bot comments and likes are now easily detected by Instagram as well, so this also causes the trust drop.

Spam-like activity

Instagram is fighting against bots and automation, and for the past six months, this combat is especially fierce. Now, even those users who don’t use any automation tools at all are at risk of getting flagged. Some manual and organic activity is interpreted by Instagram as spam-like, especially over posting, over liking, repetitive comments, too many follow/unfollows at a time, same or irrelevant hashtags use, tagging people that are not in your post, direct messaging to people who don’t follow you, comment pods, and even links in your bio. The latter is discussed on Reddit and forums dedicated to Instagram marketing.

To stop acting like a bot, post up to two times a day. If you do it more often, the platform views it as spam.

To make sure you don’t exceed the daily action limits, don’t like, comment, or follow/unfollow people too quickly in the same window of time. Instagram has daily and hourly limits that depend on your ER, account age, the number of genuine followers, and other things. If you reach and exceed the limits, your account may get banned.

Combin Growth stops all the activity once you reach your daily limits

Repetitive comments are also a reason for the potentially low trust score. Instagram detects if you write the same comment under multiple posts. Use various comments under each post and make them sound human-like. One emoji is clearly not enough.

Repetitive hashtags are considered as spam, as well. If you promote your posts with hashtags, use different packs of them for each post you publish. Otherwise, Instagram will think you’re spamming. Different hashtags alone are not enough; they should also be relevant to your content.

Tagging people that are not in your post is spamming from Instagram’s perspective. Once you upload a post, no need to tag every celebrity or influencer you have on your mind. Mention only those people who are actually in the picture or a video you’re publishing.

Mass direct message sending to people who don’t follow you looks suspicious and obtrusive, so Instagram punishes users who do that. Especially, if you send the same message.

If you’re involved in a group of people who comment on each others’ posts on Instagram, you should get out of there ASAP. The so-called comment pods are not going to do any good for your Instagram growth and the ER raise. The thing is that Instagram algorithms are not stupid and see that the same people constantly comment on each others’ posts.

How to revive the Instagram trust score

Instagram is a puzzle that sometimes makes things complicated. Still, there are tips that will not do any harm to your account but, on the contrary, revive your trustworthiness.

#1. Post consistently.

Consistently, not constantly. As we’ve said, one or two posts a day will do.

#2. Comment and like your followings.

No matter manually or automatically, comment on your feed and like the posts there. And forget about one-word, emoji, or same comments.

#3. Use relevant hashtags.

Hashtags should reflect the content of your post. Even if some popular hashtags dedicated to a big event or recent trend, try to bind them to your business or content anyhow. Otherwise, it’s nothing but spam.

By the way, avoid using banned hashtags. This may lead to a shadowban or an actual ban of your account.

#4. Follow users suggested by Instagram.

If you use follow/unfollow strategy to grow your account, try to manually follow people who Instagram suggests.

#5. Follow your Facebook friends.

Connect your Instagram account to Facebook and follow your FB friends. Bots aren’t capable of that, for sure.

#6. Tag relevant people who are in your photo.

#7. Tag relevant brands who are in your photo or/and mentioned in the caption. But don’t overlap them, leave some space between each tag.

#8. Manually remove faux followers.

Instagram allows users to remove people who follow them from their followers’ list. Generally, every user should do such a purge periodically to make sure the engagement and trust score are not damaged by such ghost followers. To do so, go to your Followers, tap on three dots right to the user, and remove them from the list. And no worries, they will not be notified once you remove them.

#9. Engage with your audience.

Reply to the comments people leave under your posts, reply to other people’s Stories, reply in DMs, send voice messages apart from texts, and create engaging captions.

If you want not only to revive your trust score but also elevate it, here’s what can help you with that: organic engagement, followings and comments by verified users, and followings, likes, or comments by highly trust-scored users.

To read all our updates and get new Instagram marketing tips, follow us on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Youtube.