How to Increase Your Instagram Followers Using the Best Hashtag Strategies and Techniques
Are you using hashtags to their fullest capabilities?
We know that hashtags can add personality, humor, or sarcasm to an Instagram post. But did you know hashtags have the power to do even more?
The growth of your Instagram followers depends on captivating images, engaging with others, and a solid marketing foresight.
What else is important?
Let’s look at three more critical components to any hashtag strategy.
1. Choose the Right Hashtags Designed to Grow Your Specific Audience
Dominique Jackson of SproutSocial points out that Instagram has over 600 million active users, each with a combination of hashtags.
So, with this huge number in mind — how do you get your posts in front of the right people?
The answer is finding the best hashtags for your niche.
Jackson explains that there are two kinds of hashtags:
- The branded hashtag is associated with a corporate brand or marketing campaign. This accounts for over 70% of the hashtags on Instagram.
- The other 30% are community hashtags. You can think of these as community or interest-based, such as #Portland or #cycling.
Ideally, you want to use both kinds of hashtags with a preference toward community tags.
Since a successful strategy requires constant exposure to new people, choosing interest-based hashtags that will maximize your image’s exposure to different people will always be important.
Also keep in mind that Instagram has a thirty hashtag limit. You’ll want to use your best judgement balancing between self-promotional hashtags (e.g., #MyBusinessName, #MyCustomHashtag) and community tags. Too many and you’ll appear spammy. Too few and you’ll reduce your potential exposure.
For hashtag ideas use Hashtagify, the free hashtag search engine. Search a hashtag and it will return popular related tags. These hashtags can expand your reach without veering too far away from your photo’s subject or topic.
Here are some additional hashtag techniques we recommend:
- Copy — literally — popular tags used in your niche, as explained by Sarah at Venus Trapped in Mars. She makes her point by sharing the popular hashtags used by Mommy bloggers on Instagram. Or check out this hashtag list for food bloggers, compiled by The Simple Sweet Life.
- Search Instagram for keywords and choose related ones. For example, if you included #Portland, consider adding #PortlandOR or #PortlandMaine.
- Follow trending hashtags on other social platforms. Careful, though: only use trending hashtags that relate to your topic. Otherwise, you will be seen as highjacking topics for your own benefit.
- Consider controversial or popular hashtags carefully before using. Jumping onto a hashtag connected to rescue operations for self-promotion would be in bad taste, for example, and likely to backfire.
2. Use Instagram Tools to Automate Your Content Generation
As social media evolves, so do the tools used to manage it.
Some are truly useful and time-saving. Others promise large returns of likes, followers, or tweets. Many argue the legitimacy of this potential gaming of the system through automated bots, which is against Instagram’s Terms of Service.
Nathan Chan of the Huffington Post outlines seven tools that helped him grow his Foundr Magazine Instagram account. Among these is Crowdfire ($9.99/mo) that can copy other audiences and automatically follow and unfollow users. A similar tool is Zen-Promo.
Research your selected tool carefully. Give access to your Instagram account with care because it just takes one misbehaving service to put your account at risk.
We feel so strongly about this that we’ve made it a point not to use automated tools with our content development strategy.
When in doubt focus on curation of hashtags, which is free.
3. Double Down on Timeless Techniques
Social media tactics are always in a state of continuous change. Regardless of technological progress, however, there are constants to audience building.
These constants are rooted in knowing your product, your offering, and your ideal customer. Nurture these and you can quickly double or triple your audience.
Let’s apply these timeless techniques to hashtags, a primary discovery driver in Instagram:
Know your product or service
Knowledge of your product exists beyond its literal functionality; you must understand the strengths and weaknesses of it compared to your competition.
Hashtag tip: Select hashtags that highlight how your product or service is different from the competition. A benefit that might be obvious to you should be spelled out for new prospects.
Communicate your product’s value propositions and unique selling position
Know that Instagram, as a platform, prefers visually stimulating photos over outright sales pitches. Use this to your advantage by first creating photos that communicate a mood. Then, strategically connect these your product or service.
Hashtag tip: If you sell a physical object, like a blender, consider tagging your post with common words and the location rather than the object itself. Hashtagging photos #holidays #celebration #familymeals #friends conveys a blender’s role in someone’s life more than #blender.
Speak to the heart of your ideal customer
Your product or service should be positioned to resonate with your ideal customer, and so should your brand’s voice. Be authentic, but tailor your communication to their world when describing your product or service.
Hashtag tip: Look for customer feedback on the best hashtags that describe your product or service. Study customer comments on social media on your product/service, or on your competitors’, as a way to get inside their heads. Speak to your customers in their own words.
4. Always Be Innovating
These are the techniques to master if you want to double or triple the size of your audience.
Make sure you’re on track by consistently promoting a creative balance of hashtag research, curated tools, and timeless marketing.
Keep your eyes on new technology. For example — Polygram, an image-sharing social app similar to Instagram, recently launched. (Polygram registers “likes” using facial recognition of smiles.)
Finally, patience is a virtue. With anything that is growing — it takes time and consistency using the tips mentioned above.
