How To Find the Best Hashtags for Instagram Growth

Want to learn how to find the best hashtags for Instagram growth in 2022? Whether you're trying to connect with a new audience or grow your existing fan base, hashtags are an underutilized tool in 2022. But let's face it - you don't really have the time to flip through your favorite influencer accounts and steal their hashtags. What if there was a way to automate this process and help you supercharge Instagram growth?

Fortunately, there is: Instagram scraping.

We know what you're thinking - what is Instagram scraping? We recently wrote a complete guide on this subject to give you some basic information. It's definitely worth a read if you're new to the world of web scraping. In this article, however, we're going to teach you how to find the best hashtags for Instagram growth in 2022.

While you may not be as popular as the hashtag yet, you can certainly use it to help you get there. In this article, you will learn exactly how to grow your Instagram account using the best hashtags for your specific niche using Social Scrape with a dash of Javascript. First things first - some basic information on hashtags, and the power they can unlock for your business.

Why Learn How To Find The Best Hashtags For Instagram?

If you're just being introduced to the world of hashtags, you might not be convinced that they're worth your time or energy. Make no mistake, though, these are going to be one of your greatest weapons in the battle to find your ideal audience. They are not even just exclusive to Instagram - you can use these on every social media site these days, from TikTok to Facebook, Twitter, and more. Here is how they work:

How do Hashtags work? 🎰

Hashtags are a way for Instagram to identify your posts, what topic it is you are posting about, and ultimately feed it into an algorithm that target's that topic's audience. Using the right hashtags is a definite way to get discovered by users who are most interested in viewing your content.

Next time you make a post on Instagram, think about what hashtags you want to use and why. Let's use the example that you're an upcoming travel blogger/influencer. After visiting Spain, you want to post some of your best shots to show your followers all the beautiful spots you explored. If you for instance went to Park Guell, a park very famous for its architecture in Spain, you may want to use the hashtag #parkguell or #guell, rather than just #park. Since the park is famous for its architecture you may also use #architecture or #art. While both of these are much broader than #parkguell, because of Park Guell's popularity your post could pull in a lot of viewers from each of those hashtag audiences. 💬

When strategically using hashtags, you'd be surprised just how many views you can pull into your post. 👀

Tips on Finding the Right Social Targets for You 🎯

Now that you know why you need hashtags in your post, you may be wondering how to find the right ones for you? Besides targeting what your post is specifically about, also think about what audience your content is aimed at.

Let's refer back to that travel influencer reference we made previously. You are ultimately trying to grow an audience of other people who either like to travel or like to look at other people's trips. You may use the hashtags #explore, #loveToTravel, #travelPhotography, #vacation, etc. All of these signs that you are someone that likes to take and post about your adventures. And as a user who is interested in seeing that, you've just made it much easier to find your account and tap that follow button!

While looking up "best hashtags for travel accounts", may get the job done, it can be done better. There's a very likely chance that as an influencer, you also follow other influencers. Let's take a look at these influencers, and in this case the bigger the better. If you scroll through their posts there is almost 99% chance they use hashtags in their captions, if they don't, you should question how they have received so many followers and whether they could potentially be fake. Once you've found a popular, successful, travel influencer that uses hashtags in their posts, take note of that account. That account is now going to be a social target for you!

What is a social target? A social target is an account that has the same interests, and posts in the same genre, as you. With all of this considered, it can be assumed that the followers from those accounts are likely to be interested in and follow you as well.

After determining which social targets are best for your account growth, feel free to scroll through the target accounts' posts. Take note of which hashtags are being used frequently. These may include hashtags that are more general to the account genre, rather than the specific post at hand.

While this process may be long and tedious, it's one way to survey which hashtags have a proven success rate for others. However, it doesn't need to be as long and tedious as you think. With the help of SocialScrape, you can scrape all your target accounts and run them through a script to determine the best hashtags for you, all within seconds! Let's get started!

Instagram Hashtag Scraping: Installation & Requirements 📝

We're just about ready to teach you how to find the best Instagram hashtags to grow your account with ease. First things first, though: what do you need to get started? The good news is you only need 3 things:

+ Some Knowledge of JavaScript 🧠
+ ES6 Compatibility ✅
+ Node.JS installed on your local machine 💻

Get everything installed and set up, and let's get the ball rolling!

How to Find the Best Hashtags for Instagram Account Growth using Javascript 🤔

To find the best hashtags to grow your account, let's code out the following script together! To make things easy, the script used will be illustrated in full, each action in the script will have a line commenting on its purpose so you can follow along line by line.

1. Get started by creating a new folder in your designated projects directory, <code>mkdir socialScrapeHashtags</code>. Once you've created this folder, navigate inside.

2. Inside this folder create a file that will hold your script, <code>touch getBestHashtags.js</code>, and open it up inside your code editor, this example used VScode.

3. While still inside the <code>socialScrapeHashtags</code> project directory, within the terminal run the following:

 npm i axios 

‍
To install the <code>axios</code> package. You should see a <code>package.json</code> and <code>package-lock.json</code> appear in the <code>socialScrapeHashtags</code> project directory.

4. Now that you've down all the prep-work, let's get started writing your script!

 
let axios = require('axios');

let profiles = ["maxine.js", "tech.unicorn"]
let bestHashtags = []
let finalBestHashtags = []
const getBestHashtags = (profiles) => {
  profiles.forEach((profile, index) => {
    let config = {
      method: 'get',
      url: 'https://api.socialscrape.com/v2/profile?username=' + profile,
      headers: { 
        'x-api-key': '{API_KEY}', 
        'Accept': 'application/json'
      }
    };
    axios(config, profile)
    .then(function (response) {
      const substring = '#';
      let edgeArrays = []
      let captions = []
      let data = response.data;
      let edge = data.edge_owner_to_timeline_media.edges
      edge.forEach((obj) => {
        edgeArrays.push(obj.node.edge_media_to_caption.edges)
      })
      edgeArrays.forEach((obj) =>{
        obj.forEach((edgeObj) => {
          captions.push(edgeObj.node.text)
        })
      })
      captions = captions.join()
      captions = captions.replace(/[\n\r]/g,'')
      // feel free to reuse the method above if a profile post uses a repeated symbol to format new lines
      captions = captions.split(" ")
      const matches = captions.filter(element => {
        if (element.indexOf(substring) !== -1) {
          return true;
        }
      });
      let uniqueHashtags = [...new Set(matches)]
      uniqueHashtags.forEach(hashtag => {
        bestHashtags.push(hashtag)
      })
      if ((index + 1) === profiles.length){
        bestHashtags = [...new Set(bestHashtags)]
        console.log(bestHashtags)
        return bestHashtags
      }
    })
    .catch(function (error) {
      console.log(error);
    });
  })
  return bestHashtags
}

getBestHashtags(profiles)
            
            

5. You can run this script in your terminal, by running:
‍

node getBestHashtags.js

‍
6. Watch all the amazing hashtags populate in your terminal, and head over to IG to begin your influencer journey! 🎉

## Conclusion

Finding the best hashtags for you no longer has to be your "best guess", thanks to Social Scrape, you can now receive real-time data from all over Instagram. Use this script and watch your account grow as you use the most up-to-date, relevant, hashtags for your account.

Believe it or not, that's not all Social Scrape has to offer. They even have a [Hashtag API](https://docs.socialscrape.com/reference/hashtag?), that allows you to make calls and receive data about specific hashtags. That means you can take all the data returned from your script, and further examine those hashtags with an additional API call to see just exactly how popular they are. How cool is that?!

Now that you've learned the ultimate secret to finding the perfect #hashtags to use, take some #shots and start posting! 📸

Final Thoughts On How To Find The Best Hashtags For Instagram Growth

There you have it - everything you need to know about how to find the best hashtags for Instagram growth in 2022. As you can see, it's pretty easy - especially with Social Scrape's Instagram scraping tool. There is just one thing left to do at this point - get started growing your account on autopilot using the best Instagram hashtags for your audience!

By implementing the strategy above, you'll constantly have relevant hashtags to use on your Instagram posts. You'll find that you have new fans flocking to your account in droves. Once you see what is possible just by using related hashtags on Instagram, you'll wish you'd started sooner!

If you haven't already created a SocialScrape account and test out the API by visiting our docs here. And if you run into any problems or need some advice, just email hello@socialscrape.com and we'll try to help. If you need to scrape Instagram at scale or need an end-to-end solution, you can request a custom solution. We're here to help you bring your scraping vision to life - no matter what you need, we can accommodate you. Want to learn more about scraping? Our guide on creating your own Instagram bot python is another great resource.