For many regular users and businesses, running multiple Instagram accounts is not a curious social media management option – it’s life. Many individuals and businesses use it to grow their audience and reach customers.
However, various challenges await those trying to scale or at least grow steadily: constant verifications, suspensions, bans and shadowbans for reasons often unclear and blurry.
Since Instagram is the second most valuable social media platform used by marketers, they should maintain good and safe presence there and prevent downtime to ensure the brand’s message reaches the audience.
Sudden drops in engagement and reach are a marketer’s nightmare – they affect brand reputation fast. So, in this article, you’ll learn how to protect your account from downtime and avoid bans.
Read more on the topic:
How To Run Multiple Accounts On Facebook: Step-by-Step Guide
How To Run Multiple Accounts On TikTok: Step-by-Step Guide
Banned From Facebook For No Reason? Here’s How To Avoid It
What is a Shadowban on Instagram?
A shadowban on Instagram is a restriction that limits the visibility of a user’s profile and posts without the user’s knowledge.
When you get shadowbanned, Instagram hides your profile and posts from public view – but you don’t see it. This means your content won’t appear in any hashtag feeds or on the explore page, making it much harder for people to discover your content.
But sometimes, innocent users can get caught in the crossfire and get mistakenly shadowbanned. This can happen if Instagram’s algorithms incorrectly flag your content as violating their guidelines, or if you engage in behavior that’s seen as spammy.
Why Do You Get Shadowbanned on Instagram?
Here’s why Instagram might shadowban your account:
- Posting content that goes against their community guidelines
- Sharing false or misleading information
- Publishing violent or sexually provocative posts.
To avoid getting shadowbanned, you must ensure your content aligns with Instagram’s guidelines, however blurry they are. You must remember that Instagram might think you’re a bot if you follow more than 500 people per hour or behave like a robot.
So, avoid acting like a bot – engage with other users more naturally and authentically instead.
Repeating likes and comments over and over again can also get you banned on Instagram. Don’t just mass like or copy and paste – try being more creative.
It’s also worth noting that using banned hashtags can get you shadowbanned on Instagram. This is because Instagram will ban you if you use hashtags that are not allowed to be used – it’s often about politics, religion, local protests or illegal activities. Don’t underestimate simple google research: if you use hashtags that might get you in trouble, you won’t notice the shadowban.
Read more:
Shadowbanned on TikTok? Here’s how to deal with it
Facebook Ad Account Disabled: Pro Marketer’s Tips on What To Do Next
Why Does Instagram Ban Multiple Instagram Accounts?
The phrase “multi accounting” is often connected to people creating and managing many accounts on an online game or a website to gain an unfair advantage. This is fair to some extent, especially for gaming. Getting around daily usage limits, character levels, reputation and review systems, or referral benefits is at least unethical.
Things are more complicated with SMM people. For social media marketers, managing multiple profiles is the living water – they need to reach a wider audience for their many clients. For an agency that needs a stable, effective growth strategy, social media downtime (verifications, suspensions, bans) is a major headache.
Instagram, in particular, has strict limitations on account creation. You can only create up to five Instagram identities, but if you exceed that limit, your profiles might get flagged and banned.
But why is Instagram so strict about this? They claim it’s about fairness. Banning multiple profiles, Instagram ensures everyone has an equal chance to grow their audience and succeed on the platform.
That’s fair logic, but again – only to some extent. If you’re a brand specialist managing several 100k follower profiles for your corporate clients who pay you to increase brand awareness, even 1 day of a temp ban downtime might seriously impact your social media accounts presence and following revenue.
Can you have multiple Instagram accounts?
Obviously, if you are creating content for different kinds of target audience or want to drive traffic to various products and services that need different social media marketing strategy to fulfill your business goals, having more than one Instagram account seems to be a must.
Sadly, the Instagram app doesn’t allow you to have more than five and if it might be enough for some business owners. If you are running an SMM business and need to run your clients’ accounts, five is way less than you may need.
It actually is possible to have more than five but you need to use some workarounds which we’ll cover later in the article.
How many Instagram accounts can i have?
We already mentioned that the official app allows you to run your main social media profile and 4 additional profiles as well. And for those five that are allowed, you can just use your single device, add all of them to the app and switch between each of the accounts easily.
To add new accounts just head to the settings in the app, scroll down and “Add Account” button will be there. You can create a new one or add an exsisting account from there.
Can You Use the Same Email Address for a Second Account?
Every account on the platform needs to has a unique email address tied to it so it is impossible to get yourself more than one account if you don’t have an additional email address.
How Does Instagram Detect Multiple Account Use?
Have you ever wondered how Instagram knows so much about your interests, devices, favourite places to eat, location and search history? It’s all because of the sneaky method called browser fingerprinting.
Browser fingerprinting is a technique that collects data from your browser by analyzing your device and software settings. This data can include your browser and OS type, device model, screen resolution, fonts, and even your installed plugins. Compared to cookies and geolocation, fingerprinting is extremely hard to stand against as you would need to manage hundreds of parameters in a logical, “normal” order.
Like many other websites, Instagram uses browser fingerprinting to track your online activity and personalize your experience on the platform. By collecting this data, the platform pinpoints your geographic location, tracks your search history, and serves targeted ads based on your interests.
To protect your online privacy, you should take some steps to protect from browser fingerprinting. One option is to use GoLogin, that blocks tracking scripts and other trackers.
Do Other Anti-Tracking Methods Work Against Instagram Tracker?
Spoiler: no, but it depends on your needs.
Many people turn to anti-tracking methods like VPNs or proxies when protecting online privacy. A reputable VPN will override geolocation restrictions, but it is not an adequate protection on Instagram anymore, as it cannot prevent tracking scripts from collecting data from your browser.
Proxy acts as intermediary between your device and Instagram, also protecting your IP address and making it more difficult for Instagram to track some of your activities.
Modern tracking scripts like Instagram, Meta, Amazon easily track both proxy and VPN users. That renders them ineffective against Instagram’s sophisticated tracking mechanisms with browser fingerprinting. Instagram has sophisticated, highly customized and evolving systems with skilled teams to collect user data.
If you’re using Instagram and other social media platforms for work, we strongly recommend you to not rely your work on VPNs and proxies alone, as their use may lead your accounts into permanent ban for spam reasons. To protect your privacy on Instagram modern, high level third party tools are needed. One of them is GoLogin.
How To Run Multiple Instagram Accounts Using GoLogin
Downloading and registering
Head over to GoLogin website and download GoLogin on your device. The app is available for all major OS versions.
After you install the app, register a GoLogin account with Google or e-mail. The sign up process includes a short quiz for marketing research.
A free 7-day trial of all features is activated after you sign up.
Creating a browser profile with a proxy
Your default main screen will contain a few ready-made browser profiles. These are isolated browser sessions that will allow you to run multiple accounts on any website. Let’s create a new one, add a proxy and connect an Instagram account to it.
First, click Add Profile on top right. You will get into profile creation screen. 
Here’s a visual guide on profile creation and choosing a proxy:
Notice that here you only need to set up the built-in proxy: all other profile settings are automatic. Let’s move!
1. Set your profile name. This can be done later as well.
2. Choose built-in GoLogin proxy. Built-in proxies are paid per gigabyte, but you’ll get some free traffic to test them. Third party proxies can also be used here with no restrictions.
3. Pick country from the dropdown list.
4. Choose Residential proxy type. Residential IP address is a most common connection like you have at home or office.
5. Click Check Proxy to see your new IP details. Afterwards, click Create Profile. This will return you to the table of profiles. You’re good to go!
3 Top Tips On Using Proxies Safely
- It’s critical to give each of your browser profiles a separate IP address. Do not run several profiles on same IP address or without proxy: this will get them detected.
- If you are familiar with how proxies work, feel free to use third party proxies as well. Multiple IPs can be pasted in bulk into GoLogin with just one click. Choose and buy proxies from our list of trusted providers.
- Free proxies you find at random websites can be dangerous. Being used and abused by infinite amount of users, free proxies often collect your data and tend to fail when you least expect it.
Running the profiles
Click on the Run button at your new browser profile.
A new browser window will open, which is where you work with the accounts. You can use it like regular Chrome (i.e. tabs, bookmarks, extensions and history), but this session is completely isolated from your device and other profiles.
Connecting an Instagram account to a GoLogin profile
In this new window, login into your existing Instagram account (or create a new one) – just like you would do in your regular browser.
Instagram will see this browser session as a different real device, hence not blocking you for multiple business accounts.
After your first login GoLogin will simply remember your session (it is stored in a cloud server), so you won’t have to enter passwords or codes again.
Running multiple accounts
Next, create as many browser profiles as you need to operate multiple social media accounts. Remember each profile IP needs to be different. Best advice here to not mix the proxy IPs is to rename them after your browser profile name.
You can freely run multiple GoLogin profiles at the same time with no problem. The amount of windows open simultaneously is not limited, depending only on your hardware.When you use a social account in a GoLogin profile, you won’t have to enter passwords or 2FA codes.
That’s because the session will pause and continue from a safe cloud server. To Instagram, each profile is a separate authentic device.
Stopping the profiles
When you’re done working in your accounts, click Stop on your profile in GoLogin. The browser window will close, and your session will upload to the safe cloud server.
When you restart this profile next time you need to work, the browser session will continue exactly from where you left. This is extremely comfortable and saves tons of time for account managers, even on platforms with no account blocks such as Discord.
That’s it! Try using GoLogin profiles for any social platform, marketplace or any other website. The profiles can be logged in from any location and device or shared with your partners. During the 7-day free trial, GoLogin does not limit the use of paid features, so you can test the paid functionality.
Download GoLogin for free and manage multiple accounts without bans!
Advantages Of Using GoLogin for Multiple Instagram Accounts
If you’ve struggled to manage multiple accounts on Instagram – either it’s business or just a personal account, GoLogin is your solution! Here are some advantages of using GoLogin.
No verifications needed. If you’ve tried operating more than one Instagram profile, you know how frustrating it is to keep verifying each identity repeatedly – especially with advanced multi-level 2FA. With GoLogin, you can manage your SMM presence without worrying about verification. Thanks to top level browser fingerprint management technology, all GoLogin profiles look like normal users to Instagram: you can work with no stress of being noticed.
Zero chances of IP bans. Instagram has strict rules about managing multiple accounts from the same IP address, and doing so can result in an IP ban. GoLogin eliminates this risk by allowing you to manage all your accounts from different IP addresses using rotating and mobile proxies, keeping your work safe and secure.
Advanced protection from hackers. GoLogin provides top-level security for your Instagram accounts. The platform uses advanced encryption methods to protect your accounts from hackers and other online threats, so you can know your work is safe.
GoLogin is an excellent tool for managing multiple Instagram accounts efficiently and securely. It offers several benefits to help you grow your brand and increase your social media presence. So why not give it a try?
Download GoLogin browser now and prevent work downtime running multiple Instagram accounts!
FAQ
1. Can I have 2 Instagram accounts?
Yes, Instagram allows you to have multiple accounts. You can manage up to 5 accounts from a single device. Simply long tap your profile picture at the bottom right of the app and add account. It works both on iOS and Android.
2. How do I keep my 2 Instagram accounts separate?
Keeping two Instagram accounts separate is easy. When you create a new Instagram account, make sure you use a different email address or phone number from your first account. Also, each account should have a unique username and password. When logged in, you can switch between accounts from your profile page without needing to log out and log in again. Just long tap on your profile photo at the bottom right of the mobile app. That, however, works for non-business accounts only: you should use more advanced tools like GoLogin if you don’t want to get a shadowban.
3. Can I have 2 Instagram accounts with the same email?
No, Instagram requires a unique email address for each account. However, you can create a new email address for the second account or use a phone number instead.
4. How can you tell if someone has multiple Instagram accounts?
You can’t know if someone has multiple Instagram accounts unless they’ve told you or connected them together. If you find accounts with similar content, style, or contact information, they could be controlled by the same person. Please note that privacy is a priority on Instagram, and it’s important to respect other users’ privacy.
5. How do I remove an Instagram account?
To remove an Instagram account, go to settings, then “Account,” and choose “Delete Account.” Confirm the action and follow on-screen instructions to permanently delete your account. Remember you can also hide or archive your account instead of erasing it: you will be reminded about it multiple times while you’re trying to delete.
Reference sources:
- Casaló L. V., Flavián C., Ibáñez-Sánchez S. Antecedents of consumer intention to follow and recommend an Instagram account //Online Information Review. – 2017. – Т. 41. – №. 7. – С. 1046-1063.
- https://www.statista.com/ – Most important social media platforms for marketers worldwide as of January 2022
- Singh M. Instagram marketing—The ultimate marketing strategy //International Journal of Advance and Innovative Research. – 2020. – Т. 7. – №. 1. – С. 379-382.
- Chen H. College-aged young consumers’ perceptions of social media marketing: The story of Instagram //Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising. – 2018. – Т. 39. – №. 1. – С. 22-36.
