So. You’re level 1. You want to hurry up and get to the big league status of level 2. Essentially all your work is trying to go from this
To THIS
But! What am I supposed to do in the meantime Jay? How am I supposed to grow and I can’t even access LVL2 topics yet!? Glad you asked. Consider me your level 1 Sensei, here to help you grow your account step-by-step, answering whatever you can think of. Here is our topic of the day:
- What are hashtags?
- How to effectively find/use them for growth.
- Important things to remeber using hashtags.
1) What Are Hashtags?
If Instagram was Google, hashtags would be the keyword you’d type in to find whatever sites you’re looking for. On IG, tags are searched by users to find accounts they may like. Think of them as checkpoints that spider web connect into all related checkpoints.
2)How To Find/Use Them For Growth
So big whoop Jay, we know what hashtags are, but how do we USE them!? Calm down kiddo. There’s one surefire way that I’ve found when it comes to hashtags…drumroll… ORGANIC RESEARCH!
That’s right, organic research, not some fancy app or website that spits out tags for you. Good ole elbow grease is all you need for this method. The reason why your own research is going to be better, is because it’s YOUR account. No one knows it like you. So in order to explain this, we are going to pretend I have a dog IG page…
Let’s go to a place i know you’re familiar with.
Here we will put in a super broad keyword of our niche. In this example, dog. Notice how after typing it in, #dog comes up as the highest (red circle), with lower related suggestions underneath (blue arrow).
Click on #dog and you’ll head to the top posts of the tag. Having 100M+ posts overall means that these top posts cycle wayyy more often than say a 50k posts overall tag.
With #dog having such a high volume of usage, getting top 9 would be amazing for this right? Let’s check out the kind of posts in the Top 9.
Geeeeez Jay, I can’t hit the Top 9 for that, 75k views in 2 hrs, 3940 likes in an hr, 5034 in a HALF hr…bro, come on! Don’t freak out buddy, if you remember correctly there was another little section when we were looking up #dog.
There it is. All these tags are in the same group as #dog, just less competitive. This particular tag #littledog, only having about 945k overall posts has volume but not like the monster tag #dog. Let’s check out a few of these posts shall we?
See? Way more manageable numbers to be able to hit right? If not, just rinse and repeat this process you have a whole set of tags catered to your account! To me, thats the best thing about this method. It can be done whether you’ve got a following of 5k, 50k, or 500k 
3)Important Things To Remember Using Hashtags.
•This guide is to point you in the right direction. Take the information and use it to find your own path. You might even find something better whilst doing so.
•Be careful when using hashtags, as of today, some accounts have been getting penalized by using newly created hashtags, or using “broken” tags, etc.
•When gauging the competitiveness of a tag, look at the actual engagement of the Top 9, not just the overall posts. A hashtag may have only 100k overall posts, but has a range of 5k-12k likes on all it’s Top 9’s!
In Conclusion
Hashtags are a wonderful aspect of Instagram, contributing to what makes this app so unique. Use them to your advantage and watch your accounts thrive.
Also, if you found anything in this guide helpful to you or someone else, go ahead and share some love by leaving a like 
mhm it was all 100% authentic, thats why it too so long to type/edit
