Part II of a little Instagram series to help small business owners and photographers utilize this ever-popular app is a bit later than I intended, but I am excited to be sharing it today!  If you didn’t see part 1, click here before reading this on using hashtags!  Today, I am sharing about how to make those SO important hashtags a little bit less annoying for your followers by hiding them!  This tip spread like wildfire in the creative community back in the fall, but I realize that a lot of local friends weren’t necessarily using Instagram a lot at that point, so within my Tuesdays Together group, there were a lot of creatives who weren’t sure how to do this! So I hope this is helpful!
After you spend your time researching and crafting your hashtags, you definitely want them to work for you-  which means that when people search those specific hashtags, your images are going to come up! But you also don’t want to spend time telling a beautiful story about your image, and then having that story overshadowed  by a long line of #hashtag #hashtag #hashtag. It just ruins the effect a bit!  Curious what I mean? Here is an example (and this isn’t even a sweet story about a beautiful couple)!

This looks CRAZY!  And sometimes I use even more hashtags than that.  So instead, I recommend that you insert only 2-3 in the actual post after your text, where these 10+ are. The hashtags that you insert as a part of your main text hold 2 benefits:

1). They are editable (so if you mess up on what you type, or your pesky auto-correct separates the hashtag so that it isn’t really a hashtag anymore- does anyone else have this issue?!- you can edit them)

2). They will always be visible! So when you are using hashtags that apply to your brand, or are meant for entertainment (see the first post in the series about those purposes), you want them to be visible all the time.

But there is no reason for the rest to be visible to every viewer!

So how do you hide them?

You want to open the notepad app on your phone as the first step.  On my iphone, it’s “notes”. Create a new note, and type in 6 periods, each on a separate line. It should look like this.

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Then, select all and copy those dots.  Save the note. After you make your post in instagram and post your main text, and the post is live, you want to then make a comment on your own post. You aren’t editing your text- you are making an actual comment. Paste those 6 dots, and then you can delete the last one (you need to be a line below the 5th dot for it to hide) and type in your hashtags. I do this using Keyboard Shortcuts- click here to read about that!  Then, click post!  What you will see now on your post will look like this:

Much better, right?  

Those 5 dots tell Instagram to hide that comment and those hashtags because of length…and they are not visible unless that comment is expanded. It cleans up your images, posts, and feed so much!  All those hashtags are still there, and this post is still a part of them all- they just don’t have to be seen!

I hope this is so helpful for you! Please feel free to email me at jill@jillgumphotography.com with questions for future Ask Anything posts, and follow along on Instagram @jillgumphotography– I share tips and tricks there each week as well!

For more free education for small business owners and photographers, click here!