Who doesn’t love themselves a good hack! Instagram is currently the home of so many business and brands and there are so many features and things you wouldn’t even believe you can do on the platform.

Instagram is consistently updating and releasing new features and development to help make user experience smooth for its users. As a marketer, staying abreast with these developments and updates is part of being a successful marketer on Instagram.

For this reason, we rounded up 30 hacks and features you might not know about.

These of course would depend on the current version of Instagram and the version you are using. Good thing is all items on the list are available for both mobile operating systems – Android and iOS.

Alright, let’s get right into it.

1. Make your Instagram Bio appear in more search results

Search engines do not index Instagram photos and videos, but what they can do is to index your profile so that when people do a web search for things or niche topics related to your account, your profile has a shot at popping up as one of the results.

Your username and bio should contain keywords that reflect what your business is about. So if you are a baker, your username and handle should contain keywords such as “Bakery”, “Cakes” or whatever it is you bake.

2. Reach New Audience With Stories Hashtags

Use hashtags in Stories to find new audiences. You can shrink them so they do not obstruct and are almost invisible.  This increases your chance of getting on the explore page.

You can analyze the performance of these stories with hashtags in your “insights” and see how many people discovered you page from a given story.

3. Your profile Picture

Not exactly a hack or trick, or anything. Your profile photo should be your logo, this is an easy way to increase brand awareness. Your logo is your identity which sticks in the subconscious of people who have visited your profile. When these users see your logo elsewhere, they’ll be more likely to remember your business.

4. Optimize Your Profile To Appear In The Explore Tags

The explore tab is like a mini web magazine that sorts the entire Instagram community by topics and keywords such as “Beauty”, “Sport”, “Music”, “DIY”, “Style”, “Science” and a lot more.

Using these keywords in your Instagram posts, bio and name can expose your content to the people browsing these topics.

5. Add Special Fonts To Your Bio

I’m sure you’ve probably seen a few Instagram profiles with cute looking fonts that stand out. You’ve probably been wondering why you don’t get that feature.

Well there is an easy way to do it. Well actually, there are two ways you can achieve that.

Using your mobile device;

• There are third party websites such as instafonts.io and www.lingojam.com that offer so many different nice fonts for you to choose from and it is so easy, you wouldn’t believe.

• You simply have to open one of these third party websites. You are provided an input box where you type in the text as you want it in your bio.

• When this is done, you see your text appear in a list of so many different typefaces. Go through the list until you decide on the font you like.

• Then you carry your font over to your Instagram bio by selecting “Copy” or you can highlight the text in the desired font, your phone automatically gives you’re the option to copy.
• Now you go over to your Instagram Bio and paste the copied text. The text displays in the typeface you chose.

Using your desktop

If you are using a desktop to edit your Instagram bio, then FontSpace might be the best option for you. It has a library of fonts you can download and copy into your bio in seconds.

• Click this link to take you directly to its homepage – FontSpace
• Find a font you like and select “Download” of click the ‘download from cloud’ icon that you see just below the font.
• Downloading this will open a folder on your desktop where you can pull a “.ttf” file that carries the various version of the font.
• Copy the font to your clipboard
• Open your internet browser and log into the web version of Instagram and then edit the sample text that came with the font to write your new bio.

6. Rearrange Highlights

There is no direct feature within Instagram to do this. But there is definitely a hack for it. To rearrange your highlights;

• Tap and hold on the highlight you want to come first on the row.
• An option pops just below, tap ‘Edit Highlight’
• The edit page opens up and just above the pictures; you’ll see two options – ‘Selected’ and ‘Add’. Tap to add.
• Add a picture to the selected hashtag and hit done.
• You’ll see the highlight is now first on the row.

You can delete the newly added picture; the highlight still remains first on the row.

7. Make your posts shoppable

If you are using a business account, then you can turn your posts into Shoppable posts. With on tap on the post, viewers can see the price of each product in the image, and tap again to purchase.

• Go to your account setting by clicking the menu icon in your profile, then clicking the setting icon below the page.
• Tap on ‘Business’ then ‘Shopping’ then continue.
• Tap ‘products’ then select the product catalog you want connected to your account, then tap done.

An exciting thing about this is that you can turn these Shoppable posts into ads.

8. Get verified on Instagram

Unlike the old days when you’d just have to hope Instagram finds you worthy of a blue badge, now you can ask for it.

• Go to settings; tap ‘Account’, then ‘Request Verification’.
• You’ll be asked a series of question and information to prove you are who claim to be and prove you are worth verification.

Requesting for verification doesn’t assure you will get verified. If you do send a request and get don’t get accepted, you’ll have to wait 30 days more to reapply.

9. Log into multiple accounts on the same device

If you have two separate accounts you are currently managing, say a business and personal account, then you would want to operate on both without having to log out of each to be on the other. Well, there’s a great feature for this.

• Tap you handle at the top left corner on your profile page. A pop up menu appears just below.
• Tap on ‘Add Account’ and add login or create into another account.
• To switch between accounts, simply tap on your handle on the left corner and choose the account you want to switch to.

 10. Log into 5 accounts using just one account

You can log into 5 different accounts by just logging into one. This is the multi-account login feature.

• Log in individually to all accounts using the step listed above.
• Go to the account you wish to use as a parent account, hit the menu icon and then the settings icon (for android, at the bottom).
• Scroll down below and you will find the ‘Set up Multi-Account Login’ option, tap that.

You’ll be taken to a page where you’ll see the list of all the accounts you are logged into. Select the accounts you wish to.

11. Choose which of your tagged posts and stories can be featured.

Many times, you find yourself being tagged in posts you do not even know or content you do not support being tagged in. You can put an end to this by switching off automatic tagging.

• Tap the menu icon on your profile page.
• Tap your settings option located down below
• Tap the privacy option, then tags, then toggle the button to disable ‘Add Automatically’.

12. Block posts and stories from specific accounts without unfollow

You can stop viewing posts and stories from other users accounts by muting them.

• Tap on the corner icon of a post and click mute
• Choose between mute posts or mute posts and stories.

13. Hide hashtags in posts and in stories

Hashtags are godsend when getting your post out to reach more audiences. Some of us maximize the value of hashtags but wouldn’t want to let it get in the way of our posts.

Hide hashtags in stories;

To hide hashtags in stories, you can shrink the hashtags to an insignificant size. If the story is a video or photo, the hashtags can be pushed behind them where no one can see them.  When you insert your hashtags, tap on the image or video you are posting on your story and it automatically comes before the hashtags.

Hide hashtags in posts;

A very easy way of hiding hashtags in your posts is by posting them as comments.

14. Send disappearing media in a DM

• From the home screen, tap the camera icon at the top left of the screen. Or swipe right to open the camera.
• Shoot a photo, video or Boomerang and edit as desired.
• Tap the next icon at the bottom right of the screen.
• Choose your recipient or tap the ‘+’ icon to create a new group chat.
• Tap send at the bottom of the screen.

15. Schedule you Instagram posts

In managing a social media account, there are times of the day that are most appropriate to post for maximum reach and engagement. To make sure you stick to time, you can create your content and schedule them in advance.

Tools such as Hootsuite can help with this.

16. Choose a cover photo for your video

Just like highlights, you can also choose cover photos for your videos.

• Prepare a cover photo for your video using design tools like Canva or Adobe Spark Post and place them at the beginning or end of your video with a video editing software.

• Tap the ‘+’ icon at the bottom of your screen to select a video from your library.
• Next, tap ‘Cover’
• Select the intro image from the selection of still images and then post the video.

17. Remove old photos without deleting them

I sometimes use Instagram as my media cloud storage. If you are like me, then this feature is for you.

• Open the post you want to take off you profile.
• Hit the three dotted icon by the right, just about the picture or video.
• A list slides up from down below, hit the ‘Archive’ option. The post is immediately taken away from your profile and no one will be able to view it.

To view all your archived posts, hit the menu option on the top right on your profile page and select the ‘Archive’ option.

A great thing about archiving your post is that you keep the captions, hashtags, likes and comments on the post. And you can easily put the post back up on your profile.

18. Bookmark your favorite posts

You can do this using your saved collections.

• Go to posts you’d like to save.
• Tap the bookmark icon underneath post you want to save
• It’ll automatically be added to a generic collection, but if you’d like to send it to a specific one, choose ‘save collection’.
• Here, you can select an existing collection or tap the ‘+’ icon to create and name a new one.
• To view your saved posts and collections, visit your profile and tap the menu icon. Then tap ‘saved’.

19. Add a cover photo to your highlights.

Story highlights are there until you decide to remove them. You can create highlight covers for better organization, presentation and aesthetics of the page.

To add a highlight cover photo;

• Tap and hold the highlight you wish to until a list of options swipe up below the page.
• Tap ‘Edit Highlight’.
• At the top, you’d see the current cover of the highlight and below it, the ‘Edit Cover’ option, tap that and choose an image of choice from your gallery, then hit done.

Nice thing about this is that the picture you choose as the highlight cover, doesn’t appear in the highlights.

20. Create shortcuts for common responses

iOS users can create auto-complete comments to respond to common questions.

• Tap the menu icon on your Instagram profile, then settings.
• Tap ‘Creator’ and then ‘Quick Replies’.
• Tap ‘New Quick Reply’
• Choose a phrase to act as a shortcut.
• In the message section, type the generic response you would like to create. Then hit save.
• Whenever you want to use that specific comment, type out your shortcut and your phone will automatically populate the full phrase.