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Instagram can be a highly-targeted, visual marketing channel for your brand and an opportunity to build a loyal audience that grows with your business.

In fact, over 500 million Instagram and IGTV users browse the app every day, making it home to some of the most engaged audiences around.

But like any social network out there, there are the right ways to use your Instagram profile, wrong ways to use it, and clever ways to use it find more.

In this post, we will show you how to most effectively use Instagram to increase engagement and grow a massive following over time—one that's full of real fans, not inactive fake accounts.

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How to get more followers on Instagram

Let's dive deeper into how to implement each tactic to get more Instagram followers.

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1. Use the right Instagram hashtags

Your goal on Instagram is to engage your current audience on a regular basis while also growing your number of real followers. Posting new, interesting and engaging photos will satisfy the first requirement, but to begin growing you'll find hashtagging your photos to be extremely important. Hashtagging your photos makes it easy for people to find your photos that are searching for those specific terms.

So which hashtags should you use? Just like with Twitter and other social sites, users on Instagram use certain hashtags over others. If you use popular Instagram hashtags within your photos, you're much more likely to reach new users and be discovered.

Here are the current top 20 hashtags on Instagram:

#love (1,271,692,015)

#instagood (742,795,562)

#photooftheday (507,358,504)

#fashion (487,010,088)

#beautiful (463,668,566)

#happy (427,528,663)

#cute (418,686,470)

#like4like (417,887,839)

#tbt (413,049,020)

#followme (392,011,012)

#picoftheday (380,504,677)

#follow (371,102,705)

#me (348,193,980)

#art (343,874,151)

#selfie (337,204,715)

#summer (324,498,110)

#instadaily (323,307,593)

#repost (309,603,537)

#friends (307,567,075)

#nature (303,040,276)

If you looked at the list above and said, “But none of those apply to my products or brand”, you're likely correct.

Using hashtags is one thing, using the right tags is a completely different thing.

Popular tags like the ones listed above will likely net you additional engagement and likes, however they will not lead to increased long-term engagement, new interested followers, and most importantly, sales.

If you want to tag your photos properly, you'll need to find and use the most relevant hashtags. This means doing the appropriate research to make sure you're using hashtags that not only describe your brand, but are also being searched for on Instagram.

To find relevant hashtags, you’ll want to use a free online tool like IconoSquare or Websta to start.

Below, I used Websta to find relevant, related and popular hashtags for my men’s accessory brand by searching for key hashtags that are closely related to my brand.

As an example, searching the hashtag #MensFashion, I was able to pull the following list of additional keyword hashtags along with the number of times they have been used (popularity).

how to find menswear instagram hashtags

You can also find more related hashtags and their popularity if you search for any of your target keywords directly in the Instagram app.

You’ll want to go through this exercise trying different keywords that describe your brand and products, building out your hashtag keyword list as you go.

Keep in mind that Instagram allows for a maximum of 30 hashtags per post. Additionally, the popular words will change over time, so make sure you revisit your hashtag keywords every few months to make sure you're using the best possible terms.

You can also steal hashtag ideas from competitors or similar accounts that have the kind of following you aspire to have, but you ultimately want to create your own groups of hashtags to use that relate to your specific account.

Protip #1: Here’s a trick that I use for my ecommerce businesses. For every product and product category for my stores, I have done the research to see which are the most popular Instagram hashtags around those product categories. I came up with 15-20 popular hashtags for each category of products I sell, as well as a base of 5-10 popular tags that describe my brand and product offering overall. Finally, I also created a list of popular local specific hashtags that relate to my brand.

For example:

(Brand keyword hashtags)

#mybrandname #mensfashion #mensaccessories #mensgoods #fashion #mensstyle #instafashion #menswear

(Product category keyword hashtags)

#bugatchisocks #happysocks #corgisocks #socks #sockswag #socksoftheday #sockgame #sockswagg #socksofinstagram #happysockday #sockwars #funsocks #happysockday

(Location specific keyword hashtags)

#Toronto #TorontoFashion #TorontoFashionBloggers

All of these groups of keyword hashtags are stored in a page on Evernote. This makes it easy and efficient when I’m on the go to post a new Instagram image, optimized for the most relevant keywords.

I can easily open my Evernote and copy my standard brand, product and location specific hashtags to post with each photo. Some Instagram scheduling tools also let you save caption templates that you can use to store your hashtag groups.

mens fashion hashtags in instagram posts

Doing the work upfront of researching, organizing and saving the most applicable and popular hashtags will save you a ton of time down the road, increase your engagement and help garner new followers.

Protip #2: If you’ve been posting to Instagram for a while and feel like you’ve missed out on all these opportunities to build your audience by using keyword hashtags, fret not. You can still go back and post a comment with your new hashtag keyword lists and watch the likes and followers roll in.

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