How Patience Can Help With Instagram Hashtags

*UPDATE 8/14/2020: I ran my first Instagram post with no hashtags and my ‘Reach’ was down to 37 and ‘Impressions’ down to 40. That’s as low as it can go so I am going to add Instagram hashtags to our next post – I think I got my baseline…LOL!

“Pazienza, pazienza!”  That’s what my grandmother, Giovanna (or Jean for our english friends) would exclaim while she was sitting at the kitchen table with a box grater and a wheel of cheese and I was trying to grab chunks that didn’t get ‘grated’.

Those chunks of ungrated cheese were pure taste bud heaven and the most coveted prize in the house. Along with the sizzle and the thick, sweet smell of the onions sweating in a huge pot just waiting to marry the sausage, pork, braciole and tomatoes to make the most incredible Sunday gravy (yes it’s gravy if made with meat!), there was nothing more anticipated than seeing grandma sit at the kitchen table grating the cheese.

Same with hashtags… pazienza!

The hunt for the perfect set of Instagram hashtags has to be conducted with patience. Like a great Italian chef, marrying all the ingredients in perfect harmony to produce the perfect Sunday gravy, you have to patiently test differing hashtags from different types of hashtags. It takes time to get it just right but you’ll have a lot of great meals along the way.

In other words, if your patiently formulating a strategy for your hashtags you will test a lot of different combinations. Some may be  great performers and some may be okay but they are all good. They’re all better than doing nothing at all.

How Patience Can Help With Instagram Hashtags

It’s real easy to get frustrated while testing hashtags. The numbers, especially for people like us who don’t have 5000 followers, are small. To make matters worse, when we choose hashtags that aren’t quite hitting the mark, they’re even smaller. VERY FRUSTRATING!

But have hope mio amico… having patience will help to make things better over the long haul.

When you’re testing hashtags you should get at the least, 4 or 5 posts worth of data spread over different days and times. This will give you a good baseline to measure against. In fact, the more the better.

If you can go a few weeks running the same hashtags you would gather more data and the more data you have the better the conclusions you can make. The better conclusions you make, the better the hashtags you use and the more you can grow your reach on Instagram.

I get it – patience only lasts so long. I’m the most impatient s.o.b. you’ll find, and it’s really hard for me to follow my own advice, but I’m going to try it now.

Instagram Posts With No Hashtags

In fact, I’m going one step further. You know, because I’m so averse to pushing things to the extreme. I’m going to post my next handful of Digital Marketing in 60 Seconds or Less videos with no hashtags at all.

Once I see how my posts perform and I log the data, I will start adding hashtags again to see if there is any change. I have no idea at this point what to expect but I’m gonna try anyway.

I’m hoping that with a baseline using no hashtags I can then use empirical data to measure the effectiveness of the hashtags and combinations of hashtags I use.

I have no idea if this has been done, although I’m sure it has, or if it’ll be effective. It’s basically a mad scientific experiment.

We’ll see.

I’ll let you know how it works out in a few weeks. Until then… a dopo!