It is no secret that Instagram is a powerful social media platform for social media marketing, lead generation and sales on the app itself! ⅓ of all Instagram users have purchased products from the app, and this doesn’t even include Instagram Stories or IGTV or other areas that companies are able to advertise on within the app itself. 

One of the biggest notions that all companies need to know about is Instagram hashtags. The hashtags on Instagram is the way to get your content in front of a larger audience who represents your company’s target audience.

If you continuously use the same hashtags over time, you are speaking to the same room, and if that room isn’t listening, it is going to be a bit harder to get those goals out in front of the board of directors. 

With that being said, the election season this year turned social media upside down. With Facebook under scrutiny for their advertising and very specific algorithms for their platform, consumers and the government alike wanted something to be done about this. Facebook locked down their advertising and accounts, and since Facebook owns Instagram, Instagram locked down in their own way. 

Dallas Texas marketing agencies noticed around October 28 that the “recent” posts or tab with hashtags had disappeared. It vanished, and everyone who was viewing these hashtags got the same notifications. 

This is the notification that shows on desktop and mobile versions. The placement is in a different area based on which way you log into the platform, but the same information. 

If hashtags on Instagram are the best way to get your content out in front of a larger audience and not just your followers, what are any Dallas Texas marketing agencies expected to do? 

This is the not-so-internal struggle and no one is really sure when will instagram recent hashtags be available because this update has been going on for over five weeks.

While this change has had a major impact on the overall engagement, following, reach and impressions and considering lead generation, there is a way to break through all of this! These are the top tips for still reaching your target audience and even getting a couple of sales. 

What content continues to perform best?  

This is something that marketers should be keeping in mind when creating their weekly, bi-weekly or monthly content marketing calendar and campaigns. What content should you produce during a time where hashtags are basically gone? 

What have the analytics said in the past? What content is driving the sales, website traffic and following that you are searching for? While hashtags are “gone”, our company has noticed an increase in specific content and its impressions and overall engagement. 

Here is a great example of this! Here is the post that we published out to our instagram account. 

Here are the metrics for this specific post, and you can see, 351 impressions are from hashtags. How is this possible? This is because personal and business accounts are able to follow hashtags, and your post can be boosted to the first page with comments, shared in messages and saved! 

This means, when someone comments on the post, it becomes visible in other users’ feeds that Instagram finds relevant and based on their followers. At the same time, the little message icon shows that this post was shared from one account to another, this counts in impressions. The final one is that this post was “saved” twice. This means that two accounts saved this post to review at a later date. 

There was no “action” taken from the post, but that is a great way to think about how we can get an action to be taken. What is the next step from this post? 

This is how great content can manifest itself into a series of posts that will produce higher engagement, and in return, will help you organically still reach your goals. 

While we ponder about, “when will Instagram recent hashtags be available?” there is another outlet on the platform itself! 

Instagram Stories 

In our expert opinion, Instagram Stories is one of the best things that Instagram has launched! This is because the 24 hours content is engaging, different from traditional posts, can be a bit more fun, and saved in highlights for anyone to review again and again! 

A company can even advertise on Instagram Stories if they want to! This content also puts itself in front of a new, larger audience the same way that hashtags work. And, if you add a hashtag to your story, on the “story” part of the hashtag, yours will show! 

These are the different types of content you can post! 

What would we do with these stories to add engagement? We would add a “join chat” on the blue one and a quiz part on the yellow one. From there, you can follow those who view or engage with the story! 

While breaking through is a difficult notion on Instagram, there are still ways to make sure your content is being seen, it just takes a bit more creativity on your end and even the client’s end! 

For help with your Instagram marketing strategy, give Dallas Media Group, one of the leading Dallas Texas marketing agencies a call today!