Here’s a trick that everyone gets wrong:

Go to: https://displaypurposes.com/

Type in several hashtags in relation to your niche.

Here’s the trick. You want evergreen traffic.

How do you achieve this? There are hashtag popularity stages. If, for example, you get less than 50 likes on your images, then you need to use hashtags with a popularity of below 60.

We’ve tested this with 30 mixed hashtags, 30 medium hash tags, and 30 popular hashtags over several months with the same photo.

Then we would reduce the amount of hashtags down to 5-10 for the mixed, medium and popular. We would get close to the same exact results.

Result from using popularity stages: 30-400% increase in likes and traffic on new accounts.

Instagram images usually stay in their own sphere of influence and get recycled continuously.

So here’s what we did:

We created 4 accounts and posted the same picture.

Account 1: 10 high/10 med/10 low Account 2: 30 high Account 3: 30med Account 4: 30 low

Accounts 1 and 3 had roughly the same results. Around 30 hash tag reach.

Account 2 averaged about 30.

Account 4 averaged about 50-70.

We also tried lowering hashtag count on a client’s mommy blogger account (climbed from 1-1.5k followers in a week so numbers can be a little skewed).

5 high pop hashtags: Averaging 30 hashtag reach

5 medium hashtags: Averaging 100 reach

5 low pop hashtags: 30-70 reach

Then on the same account:

Mixed 10 high/10med/10low: around 400 reach

Mix med/low: 4k reach

Conclusion: High popularity hashtags have so many posts that newer accounts get drowned out very quickly. They do not quickly pick up many likes from high popularity hashtags. I actually think that many likes from high popularity hashtags might be bots if you have a newer account.

We noticed that we received more likes on posts in the newer accounts with low popularity hashtags. Around 10 more likes on average.

So if high popularity hashtags supposedly help the account grow more, then why would low popularity hashtags get the same amount of likes or more?

We also noticed the likes with high and medium popularity hashtags quickly halted after about 30 minutes to an hour.

Low popularity hashtags would continue to drip in for a few hours.

After we ran these experiments we organically grew reach on the 1k follower account from 4k reach to nearly 20k the next week.

We hope this has been helpful! Let us know about your success!