How to Get More Likes on your Instagram Photos with this Hashtag Strategy

Stay ahead of your competition with this gameplan

Its a no brainer that using hashtags can get your photos on Instagram a good amount of likes in no time. Top that with some loyal followers, and you got a truckload of likes coming your way.

However, in the current scenario where hashtags are getting overcrowded by thousands of photos generated every minute on Instagram, its becoming difficult to get noticed in the pool.

In this article we will discuss a strategy which will help you get a good amount of likes on your photos by finding the right hashtags and making the most out of them.

Finding the right hashtags

The first and foremost task is to find the right hashtags for your photos. Remember not all hashtags will work for your photos, so its best to avoid generic hashtags like #popular or #instamood for all of your photos that you post.

Here are some steps to find out the hashtags that work and will get you more views,

• Observe the people you follow and see which hashtags they use for their photos.
• Observe your followers and find out the hashtags they use for their photos.
• If you are a brand looking to promote your product, make a list of your immediate competitors, look up their Instagram profiles and find if they use any certain hashtags for their niche.
• Try jotting down some hashtags for the location where you shoot photos. You can use Dehaze for that.
• Once you have made your research and made a list of hashtags that you want to use, its time to implement them.

Using a note app — The old school and hard way

Now that you have those hashtags ready, you will need a place to store them where you can access them while posting your photos on Instagram.

One such approach is to use a note app like Evernote or Google Keep to store your hashtags.

Group your hashtags into categories such as Travel, Food, Landscape, etc so that you can access a chunk of hashtags related to your photos easily when required.

Now all you need to do is to fire up the note app when you are posting to Instagram, copy your hashtags, switch back to Instagram and paste them.

This method though not much flexible or a good way to manage your hashtags, will do the job anyways.

Using Magnify — The smart and easy way

If you are using an Android device, then I would recommend an app called Magnify for Instagram which would act as your assistant for managing your hashtags and helping you insert them on demand in a matter of seconds.

Download Magnify from Google Play and go through the initial setup process.

Initially you will be presented with a bunch of preset tag categories that you can use, however, for adding your custom tags you will need to buy a copy of the full version at $4.49.

If you are a serious Instagrammer, this small investment will be totally worth it.

Now that you have installed and got yourself a Pro version of the app, its time to add all your tags in the app.

As with before, group your tags into proper categories and save them into Magnify. Also, try adding some location specific tags that we had discussed.

In this app we will use a special feature called Tag Chaining which will help you club together multiple groups of categories for a more diverse set of tags for your photos and better targeting.

You can use any tag chaining setting that you want but I would recommend you to use the following preset,

• Limit to 5 tags from each category
• Pick tags randomly from each category so that all tags are covered in turns

For an example, I have saved three categories for my photos,

• Paris
• City
• Nightlife

Now, what I will do is follow the regular steps to posting i.e., fire up Instagram app, select my photo which is a night time photo of the beautiful Eiffel Tower.

Here comes the beauty, while typing out my caption, I will type in an extra command to insert my tags there without even switching apps.

I typed magnify_paris_city_nightlife and then gave a space and voila! I got 13 tags placed chosen from all of the three categories that I mentioned in the command.

This made the hashtags a bit more targeted for my photo and also helps me reach a wider audience as I made use of more than one category of hashtag.

Keep experimenting

Now that you have got your first mixed hashtags from multiple categories added to your photo its time that you keep on updating your hashtags list and also try combining other hashtag categories to see which combo performs the best for you.

Let the likes flow in.

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