3 Ways To Change Your Failing Hashtags into Targeted Growth

Keep Failing at Hashtags…or don’t.

Not sure what a hashtag is? Or why you need one? Heres Your Hashtag 101!

You may think that your hashtag game is great. Maybe it is, but I’m going to bet you $100 bucks that if you are reading this it most likely isn’t. I will give you a few tools to help you track your hashtag success and keep your growth moving forward.

Why I Know You Are Doing It Wrong

 Even the savviest of all Instagrammers may be missing the winning link. That being their ability to target a group of hashtags that can actually generate real and authentic followers in a specific niche! It is a common topic these days to want to grow a following base on Instagram like how you can on Facebook. Targeted ads, a specific demographic and interest group are all part of what Facebook allows when creating content to promote. Where does Instagram stack up? How can we track our hashtag success and are there tools to do so?

If you are Hashtagging correctly, you can do this on Instagram and never pay a single dollar for any paid “boosting” of posts. Now just adding better hashtags to your post is obviously a good start, but you’re missing a huge chunk of potential growth if you stop there.

Let Me Give You 3 Simple Steps to Growing at Maximum Potential

 Be aware of your hashtag choice.

1. Choosing hashtags that match your niche market or are relevant to your line of work is very important. However, if you are choosing a hashtag like “entrepreneur” that has roughly 23-million hits per day, you are likely going to be off the recent/top posts feed within seconds of posting. Sucks right? Well, yeah. You are missing out on a huge network of people who could be itching to find your style of content. How can you fix this problem? Choose a hashtag with the same goal as entrepreneur, but is significantly less used. Example? #entrepreneurtips gets around 38k hits per day. Same market, likely the exact same type of people, but your chance of hitting the top posts and staying atop the feed is—well you do the exact math—but immensely higher! Use the tags feature in your Instagram as a tool to help you track your hashtags popularity.
2. Don’t stop once you post. Many people fail to realize that once you post with these unique hashtags that your job has really only just begun. Your journey to growth starts with you, and thankfully, you have already taken the first step. Now that you have the unique hashtags its time to take action on them. What should you do? Click on every one of the hashtags you use and like and comment on other people’s content that fall within your similar niche. Obviously they are using the same hashtag as you for a reason. So find it! Another trick? Comment with authenticity. Stop with the fake, “Great post!” or “Cool post” comments because that will do you no good. Everyone does that and if you want to stand out, you have to be better than that. How about something meaningful like, “Wow, this is something I have implamented in my work too and have seen great results!” Two things will happen. First, you will likely get an equally honest response from the creator of the content, and second, you will probably get a follower out of it.
3. Spend time on collaboration. Personally, I have seen more and more opportunities to collaborate as I have continued on this unique hashtag journey. I get people every day asking me how we could come up with content together, what they can do to help me with my business, as well as offers for income opportunity! Who doesn’t want that? I encourage you to be open and aware of these types of opportunities. Some of your best connections could come from a comment you authentically made, even if you have less followers then someone else who may have contacted the same person.

Stop Failing, Start Doing

 You are your own best chance at success. Every entrepreneur has to go through their season of ups and down, corrections and mistakes. What we do with these mistakes is our only hope at trudging onward. Hashtagging is a growth journey, not a destination. You may think your brilliant use of #love is going to help you hit the explore page simply because it is one of the most used hashtag on Instagram. Sorry friends, but #love get 1,172,487,024 uses per day. You won’t win any races with that one.

So what can you do? Narrow it down—way way down. Be open to using unique hashtags that will help you reach the same market you want to reach, but with a much smaller lens. Be authentic and not in the ‘coo,l awesome yay!’ kind of way. Ask questions on posts, comment with relatable words and be sincere. Open your ears as far as they can go. Scan the posts for opportunity to network with like minded people. If someone comments asking how they can help you, send them a message. You never know, and won’t ever know if you don’t allow for the reach out to occur.