Hashtag Spy

With Hashtag Spy (available in ContentPlanner.io) you can monitor up to 30 unique hashtags on Instagram for:

• the most recent posts
• or the most popular posts

There are many reasons why you want to monitor a set of hashtags related to your niche. 

Some of them are:

• to see the best content for certain hashtags, this gives you inspiration for your own content
• to see who’s creating content around certain hashtags
• to discover social media engagement around a hashtag
• to spot top influencers who mention certain hashtags
• to track the social media reach of your brand hashtag

Sure, you can open the Instagram app every once in a while and look up the most important hashtags for your niche. But this will take a lot of time. Instead, you can create a list of hashtags once and then you just monitor the posts coming in for these tags inside ContentPlanner.io.

Let’s have a look at how it works.

How it works

First of all, make sure you have configured an Instagram channel inside your ContentPlanner.io project that is linked to your Instagram account.

Then you should see an extra item on your dashboard called ‘Instagram Tools’:

When you click on the spy icon you will see the following page:

Let’s explain this screen in more detail:

1. On the left, you can maintain a list of hashtags that you want to follow:
   • 1a: Use the input box below the list of hashtags to add a new tag that you want to monitor
   • 1b: Press ‘Manage hashtags’ to remove items from the list
2. When you click on any of your hashtags, you will see the list with the most recent or popular posts on the right for the selected tag.
   • 2a: Use the toggle in the upper right corner to toggle between the most recent or the most popular posts. 

How we use Hashtag Spy

So, how do we use Hashtag Spy internally?

Well, we created a list with the most important hashtags for our industry (content marketing).

Some of the hashtags are:

• #instagrammarketing
• #businessideas
• #contentstrategy
• #brandingtips
• #socialmediaforbusiness
• #businesstips

Then, two times a week (on Mondays & Thursdays) we review the most popular posts for these hashtags:

• We save those posts that we might use as inspiration for our own future content (remark: never copy posts, use existing posts as an inspiration: use your own design, copy, insights). Therefore we open the post on Instagram, and we save it for later. 
• We engage (comment & like) with these popular posts because this is where many eyeballs are already looking at. You don’t want to be on an empty square; you’re looking for a crowded square!

That‘s just two times a week 30 minutes, but with a big ROI (Return On Investment)!

Conclusion

With Hashtag Spy, part of the ContentPlanner.io suite, you can monitor up to 30 unique hashtags on Instagram to see the most recent or most popular posts.

Create your own list of hashtags and start following the most popular content in your niche!