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Kia
25 Nov, 2019
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Hashtags are your posts’ wingmen and are a pretty important ingredient in the recipe of creating awesome content for Instagram.
If you’re familiar with the Ampjar Blog (well hey, welcome back!) then you’ve probably been beaten over the head with how much we recommend using hashtags as part of your posting strategy. We even have entire posts dedicated to hashtag best practices and suggestions for specific industries – like business, art, photography, and more.
So now, why are we telling you to hide these meticulously-researched things we’ve been seemingly obsessed with?
Well frankly, they can be an eyesore if copied directly into the post. 🤷 #sorrynotsorry
But you do need them to increase your brand awareness and build up your engagement.
So what do you do with content you can’t get rid of, but you also don’t want it laying out for all eyes to see? Well, like the frantic cleaning you do when your little cousins say they’re coming to visit – you find a safe hiding spot for everything valuable and hope no one goes snooping.
So without further ado, here’s the sitch on how to hide hashtags on Instagram.
Hashtags are Instagram’s whole thing, right? Up until IG and Twitter came along, # stood for nothing more than the pound button you pushed after leaving a message on an answering machine (click here if you’re younger than 25).
Then these young, hip, social media platforms hit the scene, made a fairly obsolete symbol new and practical – and now we’re telling you to go hide them?
Yup. 😎
Here’s the deal about hashtags on Instagram. Yeah, they’re helpful. And yeah, you NEED them. But no one wants to look at them.
One or two, sure. But when you’re using 10, 20, or maxing out each post with 30 hashtags – it just doesn’t look good.
First of all, all those hashtags end up looking like a big wall of text.
Huge chunks like that can be a turnoff to visitors. And those big blocks can also be distracting from your actual content, which is what SHOULD be the focus of your post after all – not your hashtags.
Have you noticed that things have gotten more mobile-centric lately?
Even though you can use Instagram on desktop, most people use a mobile device to browse. In fact, most people use a mobile device for everything on the Internet.
So the internet gods, in their benevolent quest to be always improving the individual user experience, have started focusing on making sure mobile content is as easily enjoyable and consumable as desktop content.
And one way to do that is to make sure that content – whether it’s pictures, videos, or text – fits comfortably and aesthetically pleasing on phone screens.
So as you can imagine, staring at a screen that’s half image and half hashtag wall isn’t winning any UX points. Because again, it’s not something that people want to look at.
And it’s especially not something that’s worth squeezing into the small window of space a phone offers. Those precious few inches should be optimized to broadcast your brand info and content front and center, and nothing else.
It sounds a little middle-schooly to say it, but bear with us, because it’s the truth. Even though the use of hashtags is recommended from a practical marketing standpoint, constantly using a lot of them just doesn’t look cool.
The thing is, Instagram is all about the way you look and your followers’ perception of you.
And unfortunately, the consensus tends to be that frequent and heavy hashtag usage is … lame. It comes off to users as spammy, inauthentic, and like you’re trying too hard to be noticed. And none of those things are vibes you want to give out.
So we established you NEED to use the hashtags, but you don’t want people to SEE them (just like my relationship with my favorite pair of Spanks). So we’re teaching you how to hide hashtags on Instagram. But hidden doesn’t mean invisible.
Whether you’ve noticed it or not, you’ve almost definitely seen the Instagram dots.
It’s clear they indicate more content is below, but they don’t really take the focus off of your main content, which is the image you’re sharing.
Instead, they just create a buffer of space between your pic and the novel of hashtags you’ve got hiding down below. The dots work by taking up so much space that the hashtags are pushed out of view of the screen.
Using this method is how to hide Instagram hashtags in the caption of your post itself.
If the Instagram dots aren’t your thing, you can still hide Instagram hashtags in your caption a bit more surreptitiously. The only thing is that you’ll have to choose just a couple to focus on, because you won’t be able to finesse a whole list into a conversation. And even if you could, it’d come off as more desperate and less clever.
But if you can narrow down just a couple, integrate them into the natural flow of conversation that you caption your image with. Like this:
Did you know hashtags don’t have to be used in your post caption? You can hide Instagram hashtags by nesting them in your comments beneath your picture.
You don’t have to do anything special here. Just post that same chunk of hashtags as a separate comment on your picture, instead of with the initial post.
Go ahead and do that directly after you post your pic so that you can work with the algorithm to get those tags working when your content is fresh! It’s a good idea to already have your tags copied and ready to paste when you’re ready to go live.
Instagram is built for pictures, not words.
Obviously you can include captions and make comments, but the platform wasn’t created with fancy formatting and specific text display in mind. Remember, you’re using this as a marketing platform, but others may just enjoy browsing the network – so they don’t need or care about text displays and all that.
But because you do, you have to figure out a way to work around what Instagram has given you. And that means going off-platform. Here’s what you need to do to hide hashtags on Instagram.
In this case you’re just gonna type out all your hashtags and copy/past them onto your caption. Here’s how:
Instagram has tons of tools you can use to help with your marketing efforts.
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