The Power of Instagram Search and Explore | How to Use it
Instagram search and explore is most beneficial when finding your target audience as well as the right hashtags to use for your post.
Finding Your Target Audience with Instagram Search and Explore!
Starting with the first beneficial use of Instagram search and explore, finding your target audience. Let’s discuss why this is beneficial and also how to do this properly.
In this scenario let’s pretend you have a female clothing business and want to learn how to grow your followers and gain engagement across the platform. The first thing you will want to do is find people who would most likely be your target demographic. To do this, you must use the Instagram search and explore tool.
Starting out, I recommend finding 3-5 Instagram pages that have a bigger audience than you and in the same industry. To do so, you can search for tags and pages with keywords in their name such as “boutique” “clothing” “Fashion” etc. This will hopefully bring you closer to finding pages that are right in line with what you are looking for.
Once you have found your 3-5 key target accounts, you will want to comment, like, and engage with other people who are commenting on their photos. This will give those individuals a notification from your page. This will increase the chances that they will see who you are and visit your page.
When using the Instagram search and explore tool for finding your 3-5 pages, I usually suggest finding pages that have 50K followers or more. This is because you want to make sure there are plenty of people engaging with those page’s posts so that you don’t run out of people to engage with.
Of course, use trial and error and if you notice that 2/5 pages you picked don’t have good results as far as gaining you responses, engagement or followers, switch it up and replace those 2 with two new pages.
Hashtag Finding for Instagram Search and Explore
The next way to use the Instagram search and explore tool is for generating and finding the best hashtags for your posts. Hashtags are finicky because they don’t have the same effect as they did when Instagram first came out. However, they can still add a great deal of benefit to your content. Now sure, you can use a hashtag generation app such as “HashMe” or any of the other apps. Although, to really get the good results, you have to utilize Instagram search and explore tools.
For this, when you go into the search area of Instagram, you want to make sure that you are within the “Tags” section of the search page. This is so you can search for hashtags specifically and how many times they are used daily.
This is the number you want to focus on. I assume most of you reading this have under 10K followers, or close to it. We will use these guidelines in this example. If you have 10K followers and are again a women’s clothing store, you want to use 20-30 hashtags per post. Of course, always post these as a comment on your photo. Don't post in the caption because this can make the caption look crowded.
How to Choose the Right Hashtags in the Instagram Search and Explore Page
Let us say we choose to use 30 hashtags for each post. We will want to separate into 3 groups, 10 hashtags in each group. The first group will be hashtags used under 50K times a day, the second group of 10 is of hashtags used 100-500K times a day, and the last group, hashtags used 500K+ times per day.
What this will do is it will allow you the opportunity to go viral on different hashtags of different sizes. Of course the higher the amount of uses, the harder it is to go viral. Although, if you go viral on smaller hashtags, it is easier to go viral on a medium and bigger hashtag. Sort of a ladder system.
In the search and explore area in Instagram, search for tags related to your niche like when you were looking for similar pages. “Boutique” “clothing” “womensfashion” etc. Underneath each tag you will see a number of how many uses per day. Find 10 of each guideline for a total of 30. Write these down and put them in the first comment every time you post. Your posts will start to explode with more engagement and reach!
Increasing Your Chances to Be Featured on The Instagram Search and Explore Page
Don’t forget if you want help getting to the explorer page and going viral, we offer Powerlikes! This is the best way to scale your page without having to pay thousands for ads.
It tells the Instagram algorithm that since our high quality and sized accounts are liking your page, they should let you go viral so more people can see it. Your posts would instantly get 500+ more likes per post from verified and big accounts. Pretty cool!
Reach out to us at admin@spectsocial.com if you’re ready to go viral and gain tons of engagement using this feature!
Author Chris Costello Chris Costello: Chris is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder at SpectSocial. Find him on Facebook @chris.costello.92