New to Instagram and do not know how to grow your account and gain better post engagement?

Or even if you are not new, gaining followers seems challenging, or your account looks frozen, this article will surely help you. 

First, you need to know about the factors that affect your Instagram account’s growth, and then we will look after the ways to fix the issues with them. 

1. USE OF HASHTAGS:

Hashtags play an essential role in a better reach of your posts. Unfortunately, people who are new to Instagram do not know much about it, so in this section, we will be discussing how to use Instagram hashtags for beginners.

Hashtags, when used on social media platforms, turn into links. For example, there are several keywords you can use on Instagram in the form of #hashtags. But you have to add only the selective ones (the ones that contain a higher number of posts and followers).

Hashtags can also be used in another productive way—by following hashtags of your interest, you will get more relatable content, and you can also take ideas from that to create your content.

By the following method, you can add a hashtag to your post:

• While posting something, click on the ‘caption’ box and type ‘#’ followed by the letters of your keyword without any space.

• The top hashtags related to it will start appearing, click on them, and you are done!

• Upload your post, and it will reach the people who follow those hashtags. This will increase your post engagement, and if people like your idea, your account’s growth will be faster.

Guess what? Be a creator of Hashtags and just the user of them!

You can create a hashtag of your own! Use it for all your posts targeted for a specific project. So, when other people post something about you or your project, they will use that hashtag, which will help you keep all relatable posts at a place.

Here is a complete guide about Hashtag usage.

• Which hashtag to use and which not?

Some of the hashtags are banned by Instagram, so before using a hashtag, search it on your explore page, and if you find posts related to that, you can use it.

• Where else can you add hashtags?

Apart from post descriptions, you can add them in comments, Instagram bio, etc. All are equally beneficial.

• How many hashtags to use?

You can add up to 30 hashtags to a post. It depends on you, whether you want to use that much or less, but studies show that using more than 11 hashtags gives more viewer interaction to your post.

2. IMAGE SIZE

Another factor that affects your post engagement and account growth is how the images you upload look like.

Instagram automatically crops pictures into 4:5 shape, and most of the time, the whole concept is not shown on the feed. So your post with half an image doesn’t look attractive, and it catches less attention even if you’ve used good hashtags.

Here’s how to resize your photo to fit Instagram without cropping?

Several tools are available on the internet that can resize your photo to fit Instagram without cropping. For example, many people use Canva’s paid version or Kapwing resizer, etc., to add a white background so that when it will get cropped by Instagram, the main image will be shown fully in the feed (the background part will be cropped).

You can do this with any photo editor you have.

• Choose the image you want to upload.

• Click on the ‘background’ option and choose white or any other color’s background.

• The size of the image can be kept more prominent because having a background on your Instagram post won’t affect it (instead, your post might look more attractive).

With these simple steps, you can reach a broad audience and a top social media face too!