How to follow a hashtag on Instagram now the Follow button is gone
How do I follow a hashtag on Instagram? You can’t any more. Instagram removed the Follow button from hashtag pages, and posts from tags you used to follow no longer arrive in your feed. What you can still do is open a hashtag page whenever you like, and with a small routine that gets you most of what following used to give you. This guide explains what changed, then walks through five ways to keep up with a hashtag today, and how to choose between them.
What happened to following hashtags on Instagram
Instagram announced the change in November 2024. Its statement to Social Media Today read:
“We’re removing the ability to follow a hashtag on Instagram. You will still be able to use hashtags in your posts and search with a hashtag to discover related posts. We’ll continue to show you posts that are relevant to your interests via recommendations in Feed, Explore, and Reels.”
Social Media Today’s report adds that tags people already followed would stop showing posts and Reels in their feed. Instagram’s reason, as reported, was spam: accounts that pile popular tags onto unrelated posts were filling people’s feeds with junk.
You can check this yourself. As of October 2026, Instagram’s old help article titled “How do I follow a hashtag?” opens on a page that says “This Page Isn’t Available”. The help pages about hashtags that remain describe using tags and opening hashtag pages, and say nothing about a feed of followed tags.
So any guide that tells you to open a hashtag page and tap Follow is out of date. If you still see older advice about a “Following” list of hashtags in your profile, it describes the app before the change.
What still works with hashtags
Three things a person who followed hashtags relied on are still there.
- Hashtag pages. Instagram’s help center, as of October 2026, says: “To see the page for a place or hashtag on Instagram, you can search for it or tap the location or hashtag that appears on a post.” The page collects public posts that carry the tag.
- Searching for a tag. Type it into search, with or without the
#. Our guide to how to search hashtags on Instagram covers the steps on a phone and in a browser. - Tagging your own posts. The help center says you can use up to 5 tags on a post, and posts from public accounts appear on the matching hashtag page.
What went away is the delivery. Following used to bring a tag’s posts to you. Now you go to the tag. Every method below is a way of making that trip quick and regular.
How to follow a hashtag on Instagram without a Follow button
Here are five ways to keep up with a tag, from the lightest to the most thorough. Most people combine two of them.
1. Check the hashtag page on a schedule
The direct replacement. Pick a day, open search, type the tag and look at its page.
- Open the search tab.
- Type the tag and choose it from the results.
- Look at the newest posts first. They tell you whether the tag is still active.
- Note anything worth acting on: a post to reply to, an account to look at, a new angle.
Instagram keeps a list of your recent searches, so after the first time the tag is usually one tap away. A fixed weekly slot beats checking whenever you remember, because it makes one week comparable with the next.
2. Follow the accounts that keep posting under the tag
This is the closest thing to the old feed. Open the hashtag page, find the accounts whose posts keep appearing there and suit what you are looking for, and follow them. Their posts then reach your feed through the normal route.
It works best for tags with a steady group of regular posters: a local food scene, a craft community, a sport. It works poorly for broad tags where every post comes from somebody new.
3. Save the posts worth keeping into a collection
When you find a post on a hashtag page that you want to come back to, save it. Saved posts can be sorted into collections, so one collection per tag gives you a running record of what that tag produced over time. It is slower than a feed and much easier to review.
4. Keep a short log of each tag
If you follow a tag for work, for a client or a campaign, a few lines a week turn browsing into evidence.
| Column | What to write |
|---|---|
| Tag | The exact spelling, since plural and singular are different tags |
| Date checked | The day you opened the page |
| Newest post | Hours, days or weeks old |
| Who posts there | Customers, peers, brands, spam, or a mix |
| Worth acting on | Accounts, posts or ideas you noted |
Two weeks of this tells you more than a month of scrolling, because you can see whether a tag is picking up, steady or fading.
5. Write the question down and plan the check once
The routine above gets slow when you follow several tags, or when what you actually want to know is a question about them: who is posting under a campaign tag, which tags a niche really uses, when those posts go up. Then the work that eats time is deciding what to look at, and doing it the same way every week.
That planning step is what Hashtag Ninja does. You describe what you want to know in a sentence, for example “who is posting under our launch tag and the two tags our competitors use, over the last two weeks”, and the free planner turns it into a collection plan: the tags to look at, how many posts to pull per tag, over what window, and what to look for. It lists the assumptions it made, so you can correct a wrong guess before you rely on it. It needs no signup, and you can copy the plan out as plain text and keep the same brief for next week.
To be straight about what it does today: turning a plan into a report, with the posts themselves, the numbers computed from them and a CSV, is open, on the 500 free rows a signed-in account gets every 30 days. The pricing page says what that will cost and what state it is in. The plan is still useful here, because it is the checklist you would otherwise write by hand before step one.
If your reason for following a tag is more specific, there is a page that starts from it:
- Instagram brand mention tracking when the tag is your own brand or campaign
- Instagram competitor hashtag analysis when the tag belongs to a rival
- Find UGC creators by hashtag when you follow a tag to find people to work with
The five ways compared
| Way | Effort each week | What you get | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Check the page on a schedule | A few minutes per tag | The newest public posts | One or two tags you care about |
| Follow the regular posters | Once, then nothing | Their posts in your feed | Tags with a steady community |
| Save posts into a collection | A tap per post | A record you can review | Collecting ideas or examples |
| Keep a log | A few lines per tag | Trends you can compare week to week | Work for a client or a campaign |
| Plan the check | One sentence, once | A written list of what to look at | Several tags, or a real question about them |
None of these sees posts from private accounts. Instagram keeps those off hashtag pages, so every method, manual or not, is judging the public part of a tag.
Why Instagram’s recommendations do not replace following a tag
Instagram’s statement points people to recommendations in Feed, Explore and Reels instead. Those are useful, and if you engage with posts on a subject you will usually see more of it.
They answer a different question, though. Recommendations show you what Instagram expects you to like across everything you do in the app. A followed tag showed you one tag. If you need to know what is happening under a specific campaign tag, a local tag or your own brand tag, recommendations will not reliably show you that. The hashtag page will.
Use recommendations for discovery and the hashtag page for keeping track. That split is the practical answer to how to follow a hashtag on Instagram today.
When the manual way is enough
You do not need anything beyond the app if:
- you follow one or two tags out of interest, and a weekly look is plenty;
- the tag has a small, steady community, so following its regular posters covers almost everything;
- you only want ideas, and saving the best posts into a collection is the whole job.
In those cases, pick the method that suits you from the list above and stop there. Planning earns its place when the list of tags grows, the check repeats every week for somebody else, or you need to explain what you found.
A quick routine to replace the Follow button
- Choose a day and time for your hashtag check, and keep it.
- Open each tag’s page from your recent searches and look at the newest posts first.
- Follow the accounts that keep turning up and suit you.
- Save the posts worth keeping into one collection per tag.
- Write a line per tag: how recent, who is posting, anything to act on.
- When you start a new tag, check it properly first. Banned hashtags on Instagram covers how to tell a limited tag from a healthy one, and how to find trending hashtags on Instagram covers finding new candidates.
The Follow button is gone, and the tags are still there. A short weekly habit brings them back into view, and it tends to give you a clearer picture than the old feed did, because you look on purpose rather than in passing.