Instagram is a great way to get seen or heard. If you’ve got a ton of followers, liking and commenting on each post, you’re off to a great start! If not, there’s always time. However, one front that all Instagram users can improve on is getting the most out of the app and related services. There are a number of tips and tricks which once adopted will allow your Instagram experience to be much more productive and pleasurable.

Save Your Instagram Photos to Your Phone

There’s a lot of time and effort invested on your part into each picture on your profile, so it’s only normal for you to want to have a copy of each picture on your local memory so that you could, say, access them when you have no internet connectivity, or if they are taken off or the entire site is suspended temporarily or permanently. All you need to do to ensure that a copy of each uploaded image is saved onto your device’s flash memory is to head over to Instagram settings and ensure that the “save original photos” switch is on.

Use Instagram for Filters, but Not to Post Images

A much appreciated Instagram feature is the number of filters you get for each image being uploaded. A lot of you may want to use these on any picture you take, but don’t want the pictures to land up online. The long way to do this would be to apply the filters, post it to your profile, save it to the phone and then delete the post, but that’s actually quite illogical.

The easier thing to do is; switch on Airplane Mode on your phone, which disbands all data and network connections temporarily, and then take the picture as you normally would on Instagram. Edit it, and select upload. Since the phone will have no active data connection, the upload will fail, but the beautiful edited image will be saved to your gallery anyway. Magic!

Add Hashtags to Your Images As Well As Those of Others

If someone has been taking pictures at, say, a party you have thrown, but isn’t giving you any credit, or if someone is wearing your brand of clothing or using a device from your company and you would like to get recognized, you can simply comment your personal hashtag onto their post and it serves the exact same purpose as a hashtag in the original caption would. Users can use the “explore” option and all these posts will also be visible under your hashtag.

You can use the simple trick to get followers on Instagram, and this works for your own images too if you’ve forgotten to add a particular tag or two to your bio.

Delete or Edit Comments

Be it a typo or a rage comment, comments on Instagram seems to be permanent, and you’re doomed right? Wrong. You can edit or delete the comment and wipe all existence of it from the cyberspace by following these simple steps. Tap the “comment” button again, which will take you to a separate page, with all the previous comments and a text field in it. Now, swipe from right to left on the comment you want to get rid of. A red trashcan icon appears. Click on it, and poof! It’s gone.

Stylize Your Bio and Add a Website Link under Your Name

A lot of Instagram users have really neat bios, which are very well formatted, with line breaks and other nice formatting. At first glance, you won’t be able to do this from your phone. What you have to do is prepare the entire bio on a word processor on your computer, and simply paste it in the bio section by logging in from your computer.

A fantastic trick to promote your website “inside” your post is to enter the full URL in the “location” attribute field for the post. After saving, a working link is added under your username.

Run Multiple Instagram Accounts on the Same Android Device

What if you have one Instagram account for your company’s promotional posts, and another personal account for all your friends? You can’t possibly keep separate devices, or log in and out every time, because then you miss out on real-time updates and also end up wasting a lot of time and effort. Instead, Android users have a nifty thing going for them in the form of the Instwogram app. It serves as a wrapper or a layer around the original app itself, meaning you can keep both your accounts logged in at the same time, and post your updates to any account of your choice.

Use IFTTT

Note that an online service called IFTTT can also be used to create efficient workflows which automate the entire posting, updating and saving process, for a company or a personal account. You can streamline or schedule posts and also choose to save liked or posted pictures onto Google Drive or Dropbox- it’s ridiculously easy and useful.

These fantastic, effective life hacks can help improve your Instagram experience manifold and get you even more hooked to the app than you are now! Have fun!