Though hashtags may feel relevant for "only influencers and updates" in your posts, the truth is they are more impactful than that. Hashtags facilitate organizing your content in a better way and ensure the post is reaching a wider audience. When you hashtag your posts to relevant hashtags you can enter communities, be part of conversations, and organically grow your Instagram posts!
Choosing the proper types of hashtags requires some knowledge of your audience and the subject matter that they care about. Be sure to utilize a mix of popular hashtags, niche hashtags, and branded hashtags so that you can find an audience sweet spot to get them to see your hashtags while making sure the audiences that you're hoping will be interested in your content are engaged.
Hashtags facilitate the development of communities around shared interests. As you gradually engage with conversations around a particular niche hashtag, you will find a community of like minded users from whom you can maintain positive long term relationships, this will in turn create a loyal following over time.
As we all know, Instagram only allows users to use up to 30 hashtags per post, therefore, quality of hashtags here play a major role than quantity. Thus, when using hashtags, focus on what is the need of your target audience, what they truly want rather than just using irrelevant tags to fill the space up to the limit of 30.
Create your own USP by creating a unique branded hashtag to ensure gaining a competitive advantage. Promote your own branded hashtags using stories, reels, posts, for a long term growth.
Many of us think that use of hashtags is just limited to posts, but no it isn't, use relevant hashtags in your stories as well as reels to gain better visibility.
In every field of life, consistency is the key, avoid posting content with relevant hashtags and then just ghosting everyone. Focus on building consistency by regularly posting relevant content. Moreover, if you are stuck somewhere or don't have time to post you can use post scheduling apps as well.