OriolRoda's comments

This we do.

jnovek, this is what we do. We create relationships, but this is not opposite with understanding who your audience is.

Probably our biggest mistake is that we are not familiar with these kind of tools and did not know the danger (we did check reviews of the service, of course but they were not helpful as you see).

Anyways, I appreciate your suggestions. We will indeed be more careful from now on.

I can tell you what we do: We use SM as a reach platform but then we create a direct relationship: email, telegram, FB groups. We've build a community of +150.000 people. They are not gone, however now it's harder for us to reach more people.

Just to be clear:

Our business does not rely solely on Instagram.

We have a website with over 5MM visits/year, a YouTube channel with over 30k followers and few millions visualizations.

However Instagram (and FB) are HUGE in the fitness and nutrition world.

We had post with several thousand likes and comments that we used as ads to drive traffic to our Free products.

We have spent more than 100,000$ in ads over the years.

So our Instagram account was like a big premium billboard.

All gone.

https://mhunters.com @mammothhunters (was the old account) fitness and nutrition

They don't

We have more than one channel, but this one was one of the most importants.

I posted the name of the service we used so that other people don't suffer the same fate we did.

We are in the fitness business, so no interest in getting in any kind of marketing tool war.

Can you give me advise on how to do it?

We were checking how many followers had each of our own followers. This is available information in their profile. Only that going over 37,000 manually is not feasible

We were just look who, among our followers had more followers on their own so we could contact them and suggest an affiliate model for them.

This information is available in their profile so we were not trying to sneak on anybody's data

It's not the only source of revenue, but one of the most important ones.

The thing is that if you want to reach people you need to go where people is.

thanks a lot for the interest.

As I mentioned in the main post we had an Instagram that over the years we build up to 37,000 followers, with more than 200 post (all unique content from us). The handle was: @mammothhunters

Then we committed the mistake of using a service to check who was more influential among our users (this can be done manually, so no private info breached) that flagged us as a bot.

Instagram first blocked our account.

There's been no way to get in touch with them to recover the account.

Finally we got a "tip" from an insider that the account was permanently deleted (we never got this message through the official channels).

So we've lost 3 years of work.

We started a new account 1 week ago (@mammoth.hunters) we've managed to recover 2,500 followers but we are far far far from where we were.

The worse is that this was not only a show off channel. It was the main driver for one of our products that brings over 100k a year in revenues.

Anybody has a tip on how to recover the old account?

Thanks a lot!