“Only then, when you can argue better against yourself than others can, have you done the work to hold an opinion. That is the time you can say, ‘Hey, I can hold this view, because I can’t find anyone else who can argue better against my view.’”
“Creative people naturally produce false-positives. Ideas that they think are good but aren’t. Ideas that other people have already had. Mediocre ideas that contain buried within them the seeds of much better ideas.”
“Whether we realize it or not, we define ourselves through stories. Understanding your own story is the key to understanding yourself, your world, and your capacity to act within that world.”
I’m not an Instagram expert.
But I do know how to grow an audience, create value on social media, and share new social media tips every day.
I’ve done some experimenting with my For The Interested Instagram account in the past few weeks and it’s led me to suggest you try out a strategy the Insta-experts will consider to be blasphemy.
It’s complicated, so get ready to concentrate. Ready? Here goes…
“Stop. Using. Hashtags.”
Ok, maybe it’s not THAT complicated.
But it’s the opposite of what every Instaguru out there tells you to do to grow or improve your account.
And they’re right. If you paste 20 hashtags into each of your posts, you will get more likes and followers.
You’ll feel good about yourself and your progress.
You’ll declare your social media strategy a success!
And then you’ll get nothing out of it.
Because there’s a catch.
The majority of the likes and follows you get from those magic hashtags fall into one of two categories:
Your hashtag-driven engagement is hollow —it’s not based on a true appreciation of your Clarendon-filtered work of art.
But it’s not just that your hashtags lead to meaningless likes — they also may be trick you into thinking your content is actually good!
When you stop using hashtags, you’re left with only one way to improve your Instagram traction — you have to actually produce great content.
Because without the “magic” of hashtags, your content has to actually earn its engagement.
This can be a rough reality check at first, but ultimately gives you a true sense of whether your content is good, whether it’s improving, and whether you’re building an audience that cares about what you do.
Weaning yourself off the hashtag teat may be scary, but it will push you to improve your content.
I stopped using hashtags a couple months ago and while my account hasn’t taken off overnight, it has experienced steady growth, adding a couple hundred followers during that time.
That couple hundred followers may not seem like much — and it’s certainly not an overnight success story — but it’s real.
And that gives me a significant advantage compared to the misleading data I received back in the hashtag days.
I know these new followers are (for the most part) real.
I know they pay attention.
And I know my content is good enough to drive continued growth of my account.
All of that is more valuable than anything I ever got from a hashtag.
If you dug this idea and would like me to send you more ideas about how to get the most out of social media and life in general, check out my For The Interested newsletter.
“Marketing means making it easy for people to notice you, relate to you, remember you, and tell their friends about you.”
“We find ourselves working under a false definition of community — accepting any connection, any conversation, any link as qualification — and we end up with something that looks like a mob or a mass: singular, thin, and gross.”
“There are now more than 5,000 tools in the marketing technology landscape. So where do you start?”
“Hopping from industry to industry has huge costs. You have to learn the industry, market, people, unwritten rules, you name it.”
“Though parents are often inclined to see their kids as talented and exceptional, most would still be startled to learn that hundreds, or thousands, of other teens suddenly worship their son or daughter.”
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” – Steve Jobs