It’s so hard to reach people on Instagram, and It gets more complicated by the day. Leave the reaching new people; Instagram has many limitations even to reach your audience. And this is a very frustrating thing for content creators.
I admit I struggle to reach even my followers these days on the platform. Because of that reason, Instagram is getting so much backlash from the creator community. We, creators, built millions and billions of users on this platform. Because of the community we carry along, Instagram has this place to sell millions of dollars with ads.
And because of this very same reason, Instagram pushes every on the platform to advertise. If you are a small content creator or just started, you don’t want to spend money to build up and create a community of people following your journey.
Your best bet is hashtag strategy to reach new people. And today, we’re going to talk about hashtags and how we can use them on Instagram to get new people and grow our community.
Before we start, I want to make that very clear:
It’s not easy at all!
I am only sharing the things that worked for me, and what you need to do is up to you. It depends on many factors.
And, of course, you can use all these strategies on Tiktok, too.
If you are a small creator with only a few thousand followers, using ad spend to acquire new people is not the best way to go when trying to reach your audience, especially if you’re still starting.
It would help if you grew organically, which means doing the hard work. Hashtags are one of the best ways to grow on Instagram without investing money organically. They are still free resources!
The hashtag is a word or a phrase with no spaces that usually describe what your post is about. Depending on the subject you’re posting about, tags can be #Cats, #Fashion, #Food, etc.
I tend to use hashtags because I love them. See how many people tagged their photos on my Instagram profile below. As of this writing, I have about 100-150 hashtags I used on my posts and rotating them. Hashtags are essential for an Instagram to explore page, especially if you want to grow organically. They are an essential factor, and they help your post appear on the explore page, which is one of the best places for new users to see your photos.
You can use hashtags when you start your journey or after a few years. It depends on how big your account is already and how many people have seen your photos multiple times. You can use hashtags when you have only a few hundred followers or even tens of thousands, but you need to be wise in using them. It’s not something that will work right away.
It would be best if you did it over and over. Try different tags every time until you find the most effective ones. Also, you can’t just use popular tags like #Tbt and expect instant results, and it will take time.
Hashtag Research is the most crucial part of this strategy, you can use many tools to do that, but I will focus on two of them only.
The first one is called “Later” which is free, they have a paid version too, but a couple of days don’t need to try it out.
The second one is “Hashtastic” it’s an excellent tool. Similar to Later, you can see how your previously used hashtags did well if your photos are shown under that hashtag’s popular page.
However, if you’re smart enough and spend time on this step, you will find the hashtags that work best.
After finding the best hashtags, I type them into my post and then save them! You can use up to 30 tags per post or 150 for Stories which is fantastic. Instagram insists you only need up to 10 hashtags, but in my experience, I’ve seen posts with 30 hashtags get 5K to 10K likes.
