How I’m Using Medium Strategies To Grow On Instagram
By: James Ssekamatte
Tags: Instagram, Content Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Content Strategy

How hashtags affect growth on Instagram

According to agorapulse’s research on hashtag usage, after posting over 140 posts across 4 different Instagram accounts, it was discovered that posts with hashtags resulted in a 70.14% increase in Likes compared to those without hashtags.

Hashtags are important but they need to be done right too.

When most people tag their work on Instagram, they use popular hashtags. Popular hashtags push their work into a large pool of similar people using those same hashtags.

The problem here is that people do not have the time to go through all the content in a certain hashtag. They leave that work for algorithms to recommend some of the content to them via their explore page.

But you know who has the time to scroll through all the content in a given hashtag?… Exactly. BOTS!!!

Bots are fast and efficient in getting through all the content in a hashtag and taking the necessary action depending on what they were programmed to do.

This is why when you tag your work with those popular hashtags, you may get a lot of bot activity on your account in form of likes, emoji or cheesy comments, or follows(with a scheduled unfollow).

When you get your bot likes, the Instagram algorithm pushes it out more within that hashtag and since little to no human beings are actively looking through all the content in that hashtag, your work falls into the hands of more bots.

Something different then happens at this stage.

When those bots see your work, they are programmed to detect bot activity on your account and if they see that there is a lot of bot activity compared to real human activity on your account, they stay away from your work entirely so your content just flops after a few bot interactions many of which unfollow you with 2 weeks of following you if they did.

The reason for this is simple. Imagine you have a bot that is doing all the work for you and seven other people also have bots doing the interaction work for them. The last thing you want is to have those seven other people following your account because, in the future, those bots won’t come back to interact with your content unless they are programmed to do so. This means that you would have fake followers. People who program this automation software (bots) make sure that they find a way of minimizing bot-bot interactions.

This causes you not to grow however much you try to make great content on Instagram.

This is what I found out when I started researching how Tanushree was getting amazing success(10,000+ followers)with actual human beings and I was stuck with less than 100 (40 followers to be exact. 50% of whom were bots).

Her tags had popular tags in them but she had another unique approach to how she varied the hashtags.

To explain it simply, let us go back to first grade English.

When we were studying English in the first grade, or even French and Latin in later grades, we were often given a photo and told to describe what we saw. In fact, nursery school English was even more accurate. They asked us to name the things we saw in the photo.

let’s take this charcoal sketch below I did a while back.

Charcoal Sketch of Reem by Author

When most people are posting this, they will use the popular hashtags that this sketch describes. For example the name of the model, the nature of work things like #art, #instagramartist,#pencilsketch, and all that stuff.

Those hashtags although relevant to this sketch do not do your work any justice when you only use them in your work. They come with a lot of bot activity we talked about earlier because they are popular so many people program their bots to interact with content in those hashtags.

When we apply the nursery English approach and we advance it to our level of English comprehension, we can find some other less popular hashtags. These could include things like #moodypotrait, #coolgirl, #calmgirl, #thinker, and so on as far as your mind can think.

This is what my friend Tanushree was doing. At first, my research pointed to this but my logic hated the idea. Why would I limit the popular hashtags and try the less popular ones for a greater return?

The answer is because that is where people are more than bots. I will explain this later but first…let me first show you how medium helped me understand this.

On medium, tags are limited to 5 (at least as am writing this article). When tagging your work here, you have to make sure you are tagging it with relevant topics that are in your story. This is made more evident in publications.

There are so many times that I have published work in publications with large followings and they did poorly. This is not that they are not good. No. It is just mainly two reasons in my opinion.

My work was not good enough for the publication and its readers. There were a lot of other writers who submitted to the same publication I did and we got published around the same time.

When my work is not good enough for publication, it does not mean that it is bad work. It only means that it does not meet the readers’ interests as other people’s work does.

Being published in publications with 100,000+ followers and I can't get more than 100 people clicking to read my work may mean that the way I have presented it is not as good as the way other people have presented their work.

Since people’s time is limited, they begin with what interests them most and move on to others if they still have the interests. Couple that with the fact that most publications will publish a lot of content from different writers in one day, you find that readers have a lot to pick from and this depends on the interest they have.

When you publish in highly targeted and very niched publications, chances are that you will get more exposure because those publications may not have as many submissions and the audiences also like the content you are giving them if it is within the niche.

How does this relate to Instagram hashtags?

Look at those hashtags as “Instagram publications”. They introduce your work to lots of people following those tags. I think of it this way…

Hashtags are to Instagram what Publications are to medium

Unlike medium publications, you do not have to apply or submit to those tags and wait for someone to approve your work. You just have to include your hashtag and you will have automatically published your work within those hashtags/Instagram publications…

I also want to make it clear that there is a difference between tags and hashtags on Instagram. Here I am only talking about hashtags in this article.

…When you do this, there are thousands to millions of people doing the same on their posts as well.

If 1000 people submit to a given hashtag in an hour, people visiting those tags will interact with the latest submissions and maybe those submissions that are most interesting(those with the most engagement).

Interest on its own without engagement is highly subjective and when someone is presented with so many options, it even becomes harder instead of becoming more like a game of chance that you get your work in front of them.

Bots on the other hand can just go through all that content in a few minutes.

When you submit to less popular and highly niched down hashtags as well, this is like submitting to a highly targeted or less popular publication on medium.

If you don’t know what an advantage this is, here is an article that will help you understand.

Anyway, this would mean that in the case of Instagram, you make sure that you tag your work with relevant hashtags that are less popular along with a few popular hashtags.

You should also keep your hashtags around seven.

According to research by Piqora now known as Olapic, A study they did of 150,000 posts from brands on Instagram found that 7 hashtags, per photo post, generates by far the most like engagement on Instagram — up to 23% more likes.

Harsh tags beyond 9 were considered spam.

I’d suggest that you can balance your hashtags using the 80–20 rule with 80% of your hashtags being niched down/fewer followers with about ~100,000- 300,000 followers and 20% be your popular hashtags.~1M+