It was a very active week on Instagram this week. My first trip to Sydney this year, lots of driving around the city, visiting interesting labs, having dinners and breakfasts with colleagues and friends and an extra day to spend with a friend, getting some shots of a couple of the most famous landmarks in Australia (posts on those to come!).
If you want to be found, if you want people to see your posts, then you need to add appropriate hashtags. It’s fun to be creative, but it has to be something that people will search for. For example, using #checkoutmyamazingchickenburger sums up what you’re trying to say, but it’s unlikely to be a phrase people will search for. Instead, use multiple simpler hashtags that are more likely to be found:
#burger #southernfriedchicken #yum #delicious #lunch #food #foodporn
Those are all useful hashtags. Without hashtags, your posts will only be seen by people who are following you.
One cool feature in Instagram is this – when you start typing a hashtag, just wait a sec and a bunch of suggestions will appear, just like in your google search engine. Then, you can just select the ones that take your fancy or suit your post.
For example, if I am posting a photo from a trip to Hobart in Tasmania and I start typing #hobart the suggestions that appear are: #hobart #hobartandbeyond #hobarttasmania #hobartfood #hobartflorist #hobartcity #hobartlife and they are listed in order of popularity, showing the number of posts that exist with that hashtag.
FYI #hobart has 356,550 posts!
I hope you enjoyed this post and found the hashtag tip useful 🙂 If we aren’t connected on Instagram already, please come find me @desleyjane so we can connect there too!
x desleyjane
PS I checked the #checkoutmyamazingchickenburger hashtag and it does not exist. However #checkoutmyamazingheadband does! It has two posts from the same football fan.
Musings of a Frequent Flying Scientist 
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