Searching on Instagram sometimes leads to imperfect results. However, there are some good tools that might be helpful for specific information needs. The following are among the most desirable Instagram content for searching: Instagram users, hashtag-content search, hashtag-publishing-influence search, and of course specific keywords within posts.
From the Instagram Search Interface
It’s obvious that if you try to search with the “@instagram_username” or #hashtag from the basic Instagram interface you’ll get some good results to start you off, but it soon becomes clear that there are some limitations.
There are couple of useful tools that you can use to narrow down your search and get better results (at least with better filtering options), along with some relevant insights.
For example Keyhole is a real-time tracking tool for topics & users across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. You need to register if you want to try it for free, but the results provide you quite an informative overview of the frequency of hashtags, related keywords and the most influential posts. Keyhole is really strong player within the social-media-metric industry, and we feel that their trend analysis is also very insightful.
If you are focusing on getting even more information about influential hashtags, KeywordTool for Instagram should be your next stop. It helps you to find relevant hashtags and users and supports your optimal hashtag strategy. The basic version is free. Check out Display Purposes, or Seek Metrics for other options for creating your hashtag set. Incidentally, the latter will help you also with Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.
Finally, if you would like to improve the filtering possibilities of your #hashtag search, Skimagram offers the most recent Instagram posts with one-hashtag input.
Instagram content search
As you can mainly work with hashtags or usernames when searching for specific Instagram-oriented content, we should take a quick look at some easy methods for searching within indexed Instagram content on Google.
Let’s try this query example:
site:instagram.com "@metallica" OR "#metallica"
We have used some Boolean and Google advanced search operators together with tools, so we can filter our results for any time. This is efficient when you need to find a post with specific text content. Please feel free to share your methods with us.
