Instagram has introduced new tools to help users find interesting brands and vice versa. Starting today, users can follow hashtags.
“Following a hashtag is just like following a friend,” Instagram said in an announcement made Tuesday. “Now it’s even easier to stay connected with the interests, hobbies, passions and communities you care about.”
Rather than requiring users to search manually for hashtags to keep abreast of specific topics, the photosharing service now creates pages for topics, populating them with “top stories” that its algorithm curates. When users follow hashtags, they will see the latest top posts in their feed, just as if they were following another user publishing posts. Additionally, Stories including the hashtag will appear in the following user’s Stories bar as well, and a user’s followed hashtags will appear in their profile.
The new engagement method grants brands additional ways to reach photo fiends who haven’t followed their official social media accounts yet, but it comes with some caveats. Hashtag additions to the feeds of followers are algorithmically generated, and because hashtags can have multiple valid meanings, users can mark posts in their feed as irrelevant to them.
Because of this, brands that use the new feature irresponsibly can find themselves shut out from it entirely, and ultimately, the update will influence how brands use hashtags on Instagram from here on out. Because posts now easily reach audiences well beyond an account’s followers, social media managers need to doubly ensure their posts are relevant to the hashtags they include. The addition of topic following may shift the social-spend landscape as well, at least in part away from popular influencers to popular topics.
Like Spotify did with its discovery features, Instagram is giving users the ability to discover more relevant content without ever having to leave the app.
“Following hashtags is just the beginning of how we’re giving you the tools to discover and be inspired by our community,” said the Instagram announcement.
