Growing an account on Instagram is most definitely not what it used to be 2 years ago. Unfortunately, Facebook (the company) has decided to make it as hard as possible to grow on their most popular platform.
Personally, I think it’s a terrible business logic by Facebook. Just look at TikTok, the app they fear so much that they blatantly ripped off all of their features and added them to Instagram. TikTok became huge for two main reasons. Because of the fact that people need to create video content (making them put in a bigger effort when creating said content) AND the fact that ANYONE can go viral on the app.
TikTok is literally the app that gives you the biggest chance in history to go viral, EVEN if you’re a nobody.
If you use it for a couple of days, you might just run into some random video with 5 likes and 0 comments from someone who has less than 500 followers. Of course, most of those suck and you just skip past them, but that’s exactly why anybody can go viral. Anybody has a chance.
When you compare it with Instagram’s explore page, you really see the difference. It used to be hard, but possible to get there. Now? Good luck if you’re a small page. Not only that, you might get there, sure. But if the first 5 impressions are bad, YOU’RE OUT. Goodbye, try again later.
It is my understanding that Instagram’s logic is simply opposite to TikTok’s. Instagram believes that they must do every possible effort in their power to guarantee every single post on someone’s explore page will be something they will like.
Guess what, Instagram? That’s literally impossible.
You can re-write your algorithm as many times as you want. You’ll never be able to provide 100% amazing content for each individual. And honestly, seeing a couple of bad videos on TikTok bothers no one, because it takes less than a second to skip it. In fact, I believe that all of us social media app users are simply USED TO skipping content. It’s already second nature, so why not give everyone a chance at growing?
But anyway, you’re here to learn some magic trick to find out the hashtags people follow, isn’t that right?
Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but if you’re looking for a magical way to do it, you can stop reading right now. This article isn’t for you.
You see, Facebook/Instagram does NOT want you to know how many people follow each hashtag. They clearly hate allowing people to grow via hashtags when they have a small account. The system is literally designed against smaller accounts.
So, they refuse to share this incredibly precious information. But can it be considered a secret?
Not really. If you go over to the profile of someone you follow, you can see the hashtags that person follows. Simply go to their “Following” list and, if they follow any hashtags, it will say which ones on the top.
That means, that a smart social media strategy would be to create an Excel/Google Sheet document and then go over your top followers and see which hashtags they follow.
If you’re a small page you probably only have about 10–20 quality followers, so that shouldn’t be too hard to track.
Once you’ve taken care of that, there is another way to learn more followed hashtags. If you search for a hashtag, in the hashtag search screen (where the list of all the search results appear) it will tell you if someone you follow follows a hashtag on that list.
That means that, if you follow me and I follow “#what”, and you search “#what”, then it will tell you I follow that hashtag. (if more people you follow also follow this same hashtag, it will say one of the usernames and then it will tell you how many more people follow it)
Now, in order to effectively put this strategy to practice, here are the chronological steps you should take:
(Before we get started, it doesn’t matter how many people follow a certain hashtag. You will never know that (unless Facebook has a change of heart about it — which I highly doubt will happen). So, you should simply focus on what hashtags are followed at all. If one person follows one hashtag, odds are others will too.)
Step 1:
You need to follow your best followers. If you don’t want to follow anyone on your account, you can always create a similar account (or a backup account) and follow them through there. You can literally create a new account just to find new hashtags.
If you are doing the “follow for follow” method, then you should already be following a significant amount of people.
Step 2:
Create the document where you will insert the list of hashtags that are, in fact, being followed.
Step 3:
Place in the list all of the hashtags your most engaging followers follow.
Step 4:
(You should follow AT LEAST 1000 people within your niche before doing this step)
Do a regular hashtag research. See what the competitors are doing. Try to search for hashtags and look at the suggestion to see if any of them are interesting, etc…
Essentially, compile a list of quality hashtags that are related to your niche.
Step 5:
Search for each and every hashtag from the list your research returned.
Whenever there’s someone following one of those hashtags add them to your first list of hashtags (the hashtags your most engaging followers are following).
Step 6:
APPLY the hashtags. Test them, see if they truly seem to have a lot of followers or not, and eventually you will have created the best hashtag list possible for your niche.
And you’re DONE!
Yes, this WILL take a while. But guess what? At the moment no one who is lazy is capable of growing fast on Instagram. Unless, of course, they’re taking advantage of the current boost reels can give you!
Which makes me wonder… Will Instagram get rid of that boost once they implement the next big feature? Or will the competition from TikTok make them keep that boost for good?
We’ll see.
Meanwhile, work on your hashtags!
Pedro S.
