The Most Important Post you Will Read about Instagram

This will most likely be the most important post you will read about Instagram, so pay close attention. When you post there are two types of people that you are trying to reach, your current followers and your potential followers. Whenever you post, you must realize that every post has a good chance of seeing people from both groups, so you need to post accordingly. We already spoke about the importance of having your post look good in a square shape, even if it is actually a different size. Now, we need to talk about the text of the post.

As far as the length of the post, the question you need to ask yourself is how interesting is this post. If the text is incredibly captivating then write for as long as you want. If the image speaks for itself then maybe you don’t need any words at all, there is no set rule for how much text you should use in a post. Remember, that it is likely that a person will not be clicking into your bio, so if you want them to read an article or learn more about a product you should either include enough of the article that they will be really interested so that they will go and click the link, but you should just assume no one will, and create amazing stand alone content on the platform.

Now, to discuss the most game changing advice, hashtags. Why do want to have any hashtags in your instagram posts? Again, we need to discuss the five locations where people will find your posts. In the newsfeed you probably don’t want any hashtags to be seen. If someone scrolls to your post, sees the image, and is actually interested enough to read it, don’t give them hashtags to click on unless you want them to find more things of yours when they click (i.e. using hashtags related to your business). If a person is on your business’s page, or on the post’s page you also don’t want them seeing hashtags, if they have already found your content you don’t want to send them away to a different place. It is the equivalent of writing an amazing article on your site, including a link to an article or video on a different website and not having that link open in a separate window, the person is interested, they click to the other site, and you just got them to leave your site, not a very smart idea.

So, when do you want to be using hashtags? The only two times that hashtags make any sense are in the search and discover page. In our last tip we said that these two pages are very Facebook-like, in that they tailor the content specific to the user. The same way Instagram know which hashtag is used by actual humans and which pages a person searching something will most likely enjoy more, so too they know when you stuff your posts full of hashtags in hopes of rating higher. Instagram knows this trick very well, and is pushing those posts (unless actual followers have expressed interest in a specific post). I have spent the last few days looking at hundreds of posts from the discover page, and minus 1 or 2 posts, the most hashtags I saw in a post was about 5, and even that was a lot, most posts had 2 at most.

In fact, in the Instagram help section when asked how the discover and search section work they answer “For example, we may show you photos liked by people whose posts you’ve liked or posts that are liked by a large number of people in the Instagram community.”

Also, the discover page is also a bad place to have a bunch of hashtags, because if you somehow actually got your post on the discover page the last thing you want is for them to is start clicking on your long list of hashtags.

So, the only place that actually makes any sense to put hashtags in at all is to show up higher on search. So for 4 out of 5 of the locations, you are giving your viewers a bad experience. But, does stuffing all of your posts with 30+ hashtags even help you on search?

When you search a hashtag the first nine results are the top posts with that hashtag, no matter when they were posted. To be in this section you need to have an audience already so that they can get you into this section for this specific search, so stuffing hashtags there won’t help much either. So the only place it is good is for the Most Recent section of search, but the likelihood is that someone will be drawn to the most interesting images that show up here, you probably want to have each post directly relate to the specific hashtag, so that people who search this term will be more likely to click your image over the 1000s of others to choose from.

In addition to all of this, hashtag stuffing is actually a very poor experience for your current followers. It’s basically like telling them that this post isn’t for them, it’s for other people who will hopefully find the image. So doing this for every post is basically giving everyone a reason to unfollow you.

So, knowing all of this what should you do about hashtags on Instagram? The answer is that you should definitely use them, but you should not just hashtag stuff every post. As I said in an earlier tip, find a list of 15-20 total hashtags that actual customers in your niche are using (and most likely searching) and make sure to put them in your posts, BUT (that a big but) only use 2-3 in a single post, and make sure that this hashtag fits this specific post well, so that it will get clicks within search when someone looks it up.

If you are posting enough amazing content with 2-3 hashtags in each post there is no reason that every once in awhile when you have a post that you want to go “viral” you can’t stuff a bunch of extra hashtags in that specific post, but don’t make this a habit, only do it very sporadically.