Use Foreign Language Tags
Art crosses language and culture boundaries, so why limit yourself to just one language.
English is the main language of Instagram, but many millions of users speak no English, and operate their accounts primarily in their own language. Why not use tags to try and reach some of them?
I know a little Spanish, but had no vocabulary for art words. Fortunately Google Translate, or the like, can help. Type in drawing, and discover dibujo is the Spanish word. Drawing can also be dibujando, which is used more as a tag. Or drawn is dibujado. But extraer is the Spanish for draw in the sense of to extract, withdraw, pull out. So it is worth selecting the ‘more translations’ arrow and checking the meaning. This wil also give you new words you may not have thought of.
But before you tag away it is worth checking the foreign words in the Tag Search bar in Instagram. Some of these words may have never been used, or there may be a related word which comes up which is more popular.
So pick a country and try. I have used tags in Indonesian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Italian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian. Only one of these countries has not given me any proof that the tag was beneficial.
Of course, Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. But if you go into settings on your iPhone you can have any keyboard from any language by the looks of it. It’s not hard once you know the words (thank you Google) to just copy them letter by letter.
Analytics tell me that Moscow is the city in the world which has most of my followers. That’s a surprise for a Sydney artist, so I’m glad I was using Russian tags.
I haven’t cracked languages with Arabic or Asian scripts, but I think if I can find someone fluent in the language, they can find me some tags, download the keyboard, type them into iPhone Notes and I can copy and paste when I want to use them. Since I have recently discovered that the country with my second greatest number of followers is India, I clearly need to take my own advice!
Here is today’s Instagram post of the Hotel de Ville just visible in the bottom left corner in the number one position for the Italian disegno tag. With 1.8M users, why not give it a go?
Today’s post was also Number 1 in this Russian language post of 825K users. But still be aware of finding tags in your ‘sweet-spot’ (see Blog #2), even in foreign language tags.