Instagram Account Trust Score: What it is and How to Improve Your Score

As creepy as it may sound; Just like Big Brother, Instagram is always watching, whether you’re buying followers, boosting your likes or getting other forms of engagement through automated methods, the algorithm keeps record of every action an account make, though some of this technique stated before might seem grey hat in nature; Instagram cares less about that, all they try to do is to make sure relevant contents are circulated regularly in the most organic way to keep users glued to their platform. Now you might be wondering what an account trust score is and why Instagram uses this to reward engagement and visibility to its users,

What is an Instagram account trust score?

An Instagram account trust score (sometimes 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 reduced visibility or worst case scenario getting banned.

Why does Instagram use a trust score to reward engagement?

Instagram believes that we as humans have a social circle and it’s built based on trust, the closer people are to you the higher the trust level towards the person, it could be vice versa as we’re known to rarely trust strangers. According to sociology, a trust is an act that requires a reward or incentive for human engagement. This explains why most visa application processes require proper background checks, eco-social and financial ties, or a prospective girlfriend wants to know about a guy’s background in order make a decision; same way Instagram wants to know why a huge chunk of users in China that speaks mandarin is following you when your account is in English and also your content too. You understand better now?

With the social networks hard battle against spam and bot-like activities, Instagram uses machine learning and AI to depict human interaction, 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. Like rewarding a kid with a cookie or candy for being good, the same way the algorithm rewards our accounts based on how well or bad we use them.

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. Which means your account has a low trust score.

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 engagement rate and affects your account trust score. Bot comments and likes are now easily detected by Instagram as well, so this also causes the trust drop.

Below are a couple of activities that affect an account trust score positively and negatively,

Negative activities

• Overposting
• Buying followers
• Pushing the daily limits
• Irrelevant hashtags
• Repetitive hashtags
• Repetitive comments
• Tagging wrong people
• Direct messaging random people

Positive activities

• Post regularly and try to post good content. Quality over quantity. Considering how long it may take to create a good post – publishing of 2 posts per day would be enough.
• Make video posts, go live more often and use IGTV, Instagram understands that bots won’t be able to make all that happen
• Stay under the radar and do not interact with a lot of people.
• Connect your Instagram account with your other social media accounts.
• Use only relevant hashtags. Hashtags related to the content of your photo. No reason to post a flower and use the #car hashtag
• Use different hashtags, at least 80% of them must be unique.
• The same rule as for the hashtags – comments must be unique. Try to avoid repetitive comments like “wow” “cool” and so on.
• Tag only the right people and brands that are on your photo or in the post description. No need to tag random people – they will not like it.
• Do not send a lot of direct messages to the people you don’t follow you. It may look odd, but the most important do not DM random users with the same text.

Room for Improvement

• Always reply to the comments on your feed
• Comment on users feed who commented on your feed
• Like users photos who liked your posts
• Interaction by a big trusted account (verified accounts) with your feed

The benefits

The higher the account trust level is – the more it’s allowed to. The higher it is – the better position it gets in ranking and the more users see its posts. The higher it is – the more organic and the most important quality traffic it gets.

Regardless of what is used – organic growth or bot – trust level matters. Of course trust level for account using a human-like bot to interact with users and organic growth would be different and probably bot might not make account grow so fast with millions of real followers and thousands of sales or so, but it can save you a huge volume of time, automate a lot of daily routine and possibility to get account with thousands of followers and hundreds of sales – that’s is simply amazing.

Their quite a number of benefits of having a good account trust score so make sure you’re in the good books of Instagram algorithm or else it’s going to be very difficult to grow your followers and reach out to more people to maximize your usage of the platform.