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5 Instagram Hacks You’ve Been Missing Out On

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Want to Instagram with the best of them? It’s not that far from reach. Here are five quick ways to up your game.

For professional content creators, Instagram is core to their livelihood. Some people are paid to be good at Instagram – but what about the rest of us? Here are a few secrets of the Insta-elite that even us plebeians can use to up our game.

1. How to: Add paragraph breaks within your description

You might have noticed that influencers’ Instagram posts can appear cleaner than yours. One reason for this is that many expert creators have learned a trick that allows them to insert paragraph breaks within their descriptions.

Here’s their secret: Write your description copy with the intended breaks in the Notes app on your phone, or in an email draft. Then, simply copy and paste the entire block into Instagram. Another way to do this: In the Instagram form field, press “123” in the keyboard and the Return button will magically appear.

2. How to: Hide hashtags below the fold

We get that you want to grow your following – but #realtalk, not everyone wants to scroll through the 37 hashtags you’ve associated with your one-of-a-kind street-style or adventures in nature. The best ‘grammers in the game know how to reap the benefit of hashtagging without inundating their followers.

They do this through a simple trick you might have noticed before. Since Instagram cuts off description copy and creates a continuation icon after a certain word count, you can use spaced out dots to push the hashtags below the fold. This ensures that your content is searchable.

3. How to: Never miss your friends’ content

With the new Instagram update, you’ll be lucky to catch all of your friends’ posts. A quick way to make sure your besties don’t get lost in the shuffle is to head to their profile pages and click the three dots at the top right-hand side of the screen. Select ‘Turn On Post Notifications’ and Instagram will nudge you when that user shares.

4. How to: Create a custom location in Instagram

Instagram recently made it more difficult to add custom locations to your posts. The workaround for iOS users, per Later, is to open Facebook and hit “Check In.” Once there, type in your desired location name and press Add Location.

Set up the business within Facebook – you will need to post your check in to Facebook (just hide the post if you don’t want it out there) – and then search that location within Instagram. Android users have slightly different instructions, found here.

5. How to: Make your nature photos really pop

One of the best photo-editing apps around is Google’s Snapseed, yet not many people seem to know about it. Snapseed is especially powerful when it comes to editing photos of dramatic cityscapes or scenes from nature.

For example, HDR and Drama filters make shapes and colors more accented, and the Ambiance filter adds dimension. You can even isolate areas of the photo to selective edit. Be advised: There are dozens of features, so a bit of a learning curve is involved.

Image Credit: Macworld

Source: Social Media Week

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