How to find trending posts on Instagram in your niche

To find trending posts on Instagram, start from the hashtags your niche actually uses, read what was posted to them in the last day or two, and rank those posts by engagement relative to their age. Instagram's own Explore tab shows you what is popular with you. A hashtag read shows you what is catching on with everyone posting about a subject, and that is usually what a marketer, a creator or a researcher means by "trending". This guide covers both: the manual way with nothing but the app, and a repeatable way that gives you the posts as rows you can sort.

What "trending" means on Instagram

Instagram does not publish a list of trending posts. What it has is a set of surfaces that each rank posts by a different rule:

• Explore is personalised. Two people opening it at the same minute see different grids, because it is built from what each of them already engages with.
• The Reels tab is personalised in the same way, and it is a feed of video only.
• A hashtag page gathers posts that carry one tag, from everybody. It is the closest thing the app has to a shared, subject-level view.

So "find trending posts" splits into two questions, and it helps to know which one you are asking:

1. What is popular with people like me right now? Explore answers this, and it answers it well.
2. What is taking off inside one subject, for everyone? Explore cannot answer this, because it is filtered through your own history. A hashtag can.

The rest of this article is about the second question, since it is the one a person doing research, planning content or watching a campaign needs answered the same way twice.

Step 1: pick the hashtags that define the niche

A niche on Instagram is a small set of tags that people in it reliably use. Finding that set is the first job, and it is quick:

1. Open five or six posts you would call typical of the niche.
2. Write down every hashtag in their captions.
3. Keep the tags that appear on more than one of those posts. Drop the very broad ones (#love, #instagood) that every niche shares.

Three to five tags is plenty. A very large tag moves so fast that a day of it is thousands of posts; a tiny one might see a handful a week. You want tags where a day of posting is something you can read.

If you would like to know how fast a tag moves before committing to it, the free hashtag checker reads the live recent posts of any tag and tells you its pace, what gets posted to it and which tags travel with it.

Step 2: the manual way, in the app

For a quick look, the app is enough:

1. Search the tag and open its page.
2. Scroll the posts, and for each one note the likes, the comments and how long ago it was posted.
3. Keep the posts that stand out for their age. A post from two hours ago with 400 likes is a stronger signal than a post from last week with 2,000.

That last rule is the whole trick. Raw like counts favour old posts, because they have simply had longer to collect likes. A trending post is one that is gathering engagement faster than its neighbours, so compare posts of a similar age, or divide by age.

When the manual way is enough

Stay with the app when:

• you are checking one tag, once, to get a feel for it;
• you only need to see a few standout posts, and you do not need to keep them;
• the tag is small enough that a day of posts fits on a couple of screens.

The manual way stops working as soon as you want to do it again tomorrow and compare, or when the tag is busy enough that scrolling a day of it takes longer than the insight is worth.

Step 3: a repeatable way, with posts as rows

The repeatable version is the same method with the scrolling replaced by a download. You read a tag's recent posts into a spreadsheet, one row per post, and do the ranking there.

This is what the Instagram Hashtag Scraper is built for. You give it a hashtag and a window, and it writes that hashtag's recent posts to a dataset, newest first. Each row carries the fields the trending question needs:

A typical run for this job:

1. Set Hashtag to the tag, for example coffee.
2. Set Only posts newer than to 2 days. The run stops when the feed reaches that date, so you get exactly two days of posts.
3. Set Maximum posts to a ceiling you are comfortable with. The limit is exact.
4. Paste the session cookie for an Instagram account you control. Instagram serves hashtag posts only to signed-in requests, so every method that reads a tag needs one. The step-by-step scraping guide covers where to find it.
5. Run it and export the dataset as CSV or Excel.

The scraper charges $0.0005 per post delivered to your dataset, so two days of a tag that sees 300 posts costs $0.15, and a run that finds nothing new costs nothing.

Step 4: rank by engagement per hour

With the posts in a spreadsheet, the ranking takes three columns. The Excel export guide shows how to get the dataset into a sheet cleanly.

1. Age in hours. The time of the read minus takenAt, in hours. In Excel or Google Sheets, =(NOW()-B2)*24 once takenAt is a date value.
2. Engagement. likeCount + commentCount. Leave the row blank when either count is empty rather than treating it as zero: Instagram hides counts on some posts, and a hidden count is unknown, which is different from zero.
3. Engagement per hour. Engagement divided by age. Sort descending.

The top of that list is your trending set for the tag. A few habits make it more reliable:

• Ignore the first hour or two. A post that is twenty minutes old with 30 likes can show a huge rate that means nothing yet.
• Compare within a tag, never across tags. A strong post in a small tag would be invisible in a big one.
• Read the same tag at the same time of day when you compare days, so the ages in each read are alike.

Step 5: watch it over time

One read tells you what is hot today. The pattern only shows up when you repeat it:

• Run the same tags each day with Only posts newer than set to 1 day, so each run collects only the new posts.
• Keep each day's top ten in its own sheet tab.
• Look at the hashtags column of those winners. Tags that keep appearing next to your core tag are where the niche is moving.

Because a run that finds nothing new charges nothing, a daily read of a quiet tag is close to free. Deduplication happens within a run, so give each daily run a window that does not overlap the last one, or you will collect the same posts twice.

The tools, side by side

What this method cannot tell you

Be clear about the limits before you plan around it:

• Counts are a snapshot. Likes and comments are read at the moment of the run. A post keeps collecting them afterwards.
• It reads the recent feed. The scraper walks a tag's posts newest first. It does not read the ranked top grid, so the ranking is yours, which is what makes it comparable from day to day.
• One hashtag per run. Three tags means three runs, merged in the sheet.
• Reach and saves are private. Only the post's owner sees impressions, reach and saves, so no outside method can rank by them.

The limits page lists every one, and the output page shows a full sample row.

The short version

Finding trending posts in a niche comes down to three moves: pick the tags the niche uses, read what was posted to them recently, and rank by engagement per hour. Do it in the app when you need a quick look. When you want the same answer tomorrow, and the day after, run the scraper on a two-day window and let the spreadsheet do the sorting.