Instagram growth strategy: Hashtags

Instagram has become more and more challenging every year, growing your audience and trying to understand how the platform works have continued to boggle everyone's mind. However, we may have at least one solution to the problem. As Creators Magazine grew over this past year we had the ability to speak to hundreds if not over a thousand creators, the common recurring question we had fo many creatives who had tens of thousands of organic followers was how did you grow and grow quickly.

We got many different answers but the one we have tested that worked effectively was top hashtag post-replication. I just made that title up now, because I don’t know what it is actually called.

For the longest time, we worked similar to others in the creative field, place broad general hashtags within our images and hope for the best. This surprisingly does not help whatsoever (Figures).

Here is how it works:

First go to your explore page and find a post that is interesting to you, posts on the explore page are customized to what you like (and show up based on virality and popularity) so they should be similar images or videos to the content that you are producing. If nothing on the explore page matches your style or the content you produce to go to a hashtag that matches your style and that is not overly saturated with 1 million+ posts. Find the top post that is similar in style to the image you will be posting.

Next, you will go to the comments section or the caption section and look at all the hashtags they used. If the photo is also in the top posts or near the top posts of those hashtags, write it down or copy it because this will be one of your winners. Be sure to leave an awesome comment on the image you like to support the original creator as well! If the posts do not show up in the top posts section then leave this hashtag and find another one the creator has used for that photo.

You will repeat this about 5-10 times until you have the desired amount of hashtags you like.

An important thing to know is that you’ll want to have different sets of hashtag sets that you can rotate between because for whatever reason, one photo can do amazingly well with the hashtags you decide on using but when you get lazy and post another photo with the same set of hashtags Instagram doesn’t let your photo do as well. I’m not sure why it does this but everybody we have talked to about this says it happens quite often.

This may not be a new concept for some people who are using hashtags to grow but for those who are putting out hard work consistently, this will be a game changer. The key to really extract all the use of this method of Instagram growth is by consistently creating good content and having a fantastic caption. Whether that caption is you talking about how you got the shot, what’s been happening in your life or just educating people. Everyone who will now find your images at the top spots of those hashtags will view your content and the captions. At that moment they will decide if this content they want to keep seeing or is it just a quote someone found on google and posted it to their image?

Remember if the audiences seeing your content deem it as excellent and worth following they will, but everyone has a different preference as to what they want to see on their feed.