Much like any marketing approach, it's not all about getting seen by the most amount of people, it's more important to be seen by the right people.
With more and more people flocking to Instagram, it does require a more strategic approach than just creating a profile and "winging it" to really grow your account with engaged followers. Hashtags are one of the quickest and most effective ways to attract engaged followers. When you use a hashtag on your post, your post will end up in the Explore page of that hashtag. So if you use the #oilpaintings hashtag on a photo, people browsing the #oilpaintings Explore page may come across your post and subsequently, your profile.
In the 7 Instagram Marketing Strategies for Artists Clint Watson discusses the two main factors to focus on when determining what hashtag to use. They include:
Relevancy to the content in your postProportion to the size of your Instagram account
Focusing on these two critical factors when first starting out will help to ensure that your post is seen and that it's being seen by the right people.
To really grow your Instagram account, use hashtags to target your engagement further. For example, let's say that you want to post an oil painting, instead of only hashtagging #oilpainting (18.8M posts), you could tag #oilpaintingart (224K posts), #oilpaintingartist (76.5K posts).
You can use Instagram to help you narrow down your hashtags by simply entering one keyword into the Search bar and viewing the hashtags as shown below:
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