Instagram New Rules and Instagram Restrictions: Limits for Likes, Follows and Comments

Actions frequency restrictions in 2021

Restrictions are becoming more rigorous each year, as Instagram concentrates a lot on the content quality. Below, you’ll find the latest Instagram limits and rules of instagram.

• Stories: there are no limits for them, however, one shouldn’t make more than 30 stories a day;
• Likes limit: no more than 20 per hour (300-500 for a period of 24 hours);
• Direct messages: no more than 100 messages should be sent to followers; no more than 30-40 messages should be sent to those, who don’t follow you.
Recommendation: do not send too many DMs to those who don’t follow you. It’s a very controversial tool and you might be banned for overusing it.
• Follows limit: no more than 20 follows an hour (300-500 follows at a time for a period of 24 hours);
• Follows + Likes limit: no more than 1000 (500+500 per day) but no more than 20 per hour;
• Unfollow limit: the interval of 40-60 seconds, no more than 1000 every 24 hours from unmutual and 1000 from mutual;
• Comments limit: no more than 12-14 an hour with the interval of 350 – 400 seconds, overlimit might be treated as spam;
• Mass looking. After emergence of Stories, new automation tools made it possible to masslook them, so users could attract attention to their profiles. Unfortunately, there are also limits to this: no more than 10000 watched stories a day.

If you wish, you can get acquainted with the Instagram limits in previous years. You’ll see, how much stricter yet thorough they’ve become.

New account limitations

You should keep these in mind in case you’re not sure if Instagram treats your account as a trusted one, or if you want to secure your account from getting blocked completely.

• The interval for all actions during the first 12-20 days is 36-48 seconds;
• The total limit for all kinds of actions (follow, unfollow, like) is 500 every 24 hours.

The best strategy for new accounts would be to publish 2 or 3 images and let the account settle in for 2 or 3 weeks.

Breaking Instagram Rules

Slight abuse of these rules won’t get your account blocked, but all actions get summed up, and if at a certain period a critical amount of such actions piles up, it will lead to your page being banned or pessimized.

You can measure the significance of a regulation by how often it’s mentioned in a social network’s rules:

• Intellectual property (photos taken by other people) — 12 references;
• Comments (spam) — 4 references;
• Likes (mass liking) — 1 reference;
• Follow (mass following) — 1 reference.

Technological infractions

• Frequent change of IP-address. In cases when you log into the account from different services that use different IPs to connect;
• Frequent change of devices. Instagram keeps track of logging devices, and switching between them too often during a short period of time might get your account blocked until your circumstances are clarified;
• Buying an account. Buying an account from an unconscientious seller who had registered and filled up hundreds of pages from one IP gives you high chances of getting this account banned;
• Creating accounts. You should avoid creating accounts with automated devices, scripts, serial adders and other unsanctioned devices.

Boosting up the key figures

• Spam comments. This category of forbidden activities includes using the self-advertisement service, repeated comments, comments with commercial spam, for instance, website URLs and promo codes;
• #hashtag spam. Instagram can freeze your posts’ hashtag indexing in case you publish several images one after another with one and the same set of hashtags. You can tell it’s happened to you when your images are getting published without a description or with non-functioning hashtags;
• Mass following. A drastic and rapid increase in followers puts Instagram algorithms on guard and almost always results in blocking your account;
• Mass liking. The situation is the same as with the previous point – a rapid increase in popularity doesn’t go unnoticed by the algorithms and shuts down by having the account blocked.
• Mass looking. You can use third-party apps to masslook stories of people who don’t follow you in order to gain attention to your profile. Instagram tends to ban for this as in all the previous examples;

Forbidden content

• Photos taken by other people and people in the photos. Publishing the materials copied from the Internet and publishing the photos of other people is forbidden. The accounts that do that can be blocked at any moment;
• Document photos. Pages get banned for publishing emails, social security numbers, credit card, passport and driver’s license information, and mobile numbers that belong to you or another person;
• The same image in several pages. You shouldn’t publish one and the same image in several accounts at one and the same time. This can get all the accounts banned, even though each of them is using its own IP-address;
• The same link in several profiles. When maintaining more than one instagram page, it is strongly advised not to use the same website link. There can only be one link to a given website for one instagram account;
• Brand pages. If you’re creating a brand page for an organization or any other corporate entity, in this case Instagram will require you to provide proof you’re entitled to this kind of activity;
• Nudity. Adult content is forbidden on Instagram, as it is a platform which children are using, too. You should’t post half-nude children, even with good intentions. However, nudity in the pieces of art is fine.

We have listed the most common reasons for which the pages are getting blocked. The other actions that can lead to sanctions constitute no more than 1% of all blockings.

How to Secure Your Account from Blocking

Take these simple steps to secure your or your company’s account from blocking:

1. Checking the IP-address for blocking in Instagram

Instagram is actively using spam-bases to check IP-addresses for spam activity, one of these bases is called spamhaus. If you register and promote an Instagram account from an IP-address that is included into this base, your chances of getting the account automatically banned increase dramatically.

2. Safe work with Instagram

The risk of getting an account blocked increases in case you log into it from different IP-addresses and different devices. To make your work with Instagram safer, we recommend using personal proxy IP-addresses with no more than 2 accounts per 1 IP-address, and try not to switch devices used to log into the account.

3. Binding an account to a smartphone

Instagram restrictions actually allow to bind several pages to one and the same phone number, but this is done on purpose and definitely not for your convenience. All the accounts that have one and the same phone number in the profile are filtered and checked extra thoroughly. I strongly suggest that you bind 1 phone number to 1 account and 1 Facebook profile.

See also:

• Latest Facebook limits
• YouTube Regulations

What to Do If Your Account has Been Blocked?

– My Instagram account is blocked, what do I do now?

– The correct answer to this questions is: NOTHING!

Cease the activity in your account for several hours, don’t publish images, don’t like anyone and don’t write comments. If nothing changes in 2-3 hours, you’ll have to wait for 1 – 3 days. The worst infractions can get you banned to up to 5 days.

If Instagram started asking you to enter a capture or confirm your pages, it is a reason to get on guard and fall back.

Running a business page or simply a blog for sure requires a lot of efforts and investments. In order to double it’s efficiency, consider using Instagram Feed Widget on your website to embed Instagram content on the site.