Instagram finally rolled out a feature we have been waiting for – You can now follow hashtags!!!
Till now, there were two ways that you could deal with hashtags – a search of the hashtag you like, or clicking on a hashtag on a particular post. Which was fun, but involved quite tedious typing and retyping when you wanted to go back and find something. 
We’re particularly excited about this from a Brand perspective. For brands, who wanted to curate User-Generated Content, this meant investing in paid tools and pooling it all together.
Now, it is simply a matter of following a particular hashtag. There’s a small catch – Instagram gives you a wonderfully curated feed based on likes and popularity, so you still cannot quite let go of those tools. But it is a great start.
For general users, this means you can follow your favourite genre and discover new people. Instagram has been developing its algorithm over the past few years, ensuring that even your ‘Explore’ feed has content that you might be interested in – based on photos you’ve liked and interacted with. With some careful curation, you can actually have an explore feed filled with the best of Instagram, in whatever genre you like. The Follow Hashtag feature takes it a notch ahead. 
Of course, we’re greedy as ever and hope that Instagram also introduces a way of geo-filtering the hashtags. But till then, we’ll be playing around with this new feature and come back to you with more insights!
Pepper Pages 