Hashtags on Instagram can be tricky. Many people make the mistake of using as many generic hashtags as they can think of on a post, but it is important to establish the right hashtags to use for your business. Strategically choosing your hashtags will help increase your content reach, help you get more followers, and can even help to increase your sales as well. Oh and incase you’re completely new to hashtags, check out this post first with the basics and more tips!
How many hashtags should you use?
On Instagram, you are allowed to use up to 30 hashtags. However, there is not a clear cut answer on how many hashtags to use per post. Some have recommended as little as 3-5, others as much as 15-20. What is important is that you are researching the right hashtags for your industry and not just throwing in random hashtags. We suggest testing this out yourself to see how many/which hashtags are best to use for your business.
What hashtags should you use?
If you are finding it difficult to come up with hashtags, just remember it is important to include a variety of hashtags. You can conduct research on what hashtags to use through Instagram search. By going to the “Tags” tab on your Instagram search, you can see how popular a certain hashtag is. For example, by searching the #pool, I can see that there are 30.2 million posts associated with it.
Use this tool when choosing your hashtags. You want to include a variety of hashtags in your posts. Such as:
- Popular hashtags (300,000 to 1 million posts around these hashtags)
- Moderately popular hashtags (80,000 to 300,000 posts around these hashtags)
- Niche specific hashtags
- Branded hashtags
It is important to pick hashtags relevant to your business. Do not pick super popular hashtags such as #love, but focus on choosing hashtags specific to your business and relative to the content you are posting.
By following the guide above, your post will receive engagement from both followers and non-followers. Instagram’s algorithm could then see your post as a top performing post within your niche. To further explain, if a user is searching for those industry-specific hashtags relevant to your business, your post will be one of the first ones to show up due to you including a variety of popular and niche specific hashtags in your posts. Your post can remain one of the top performing post for months, which will increase your visibility leading to possibly more followers and more sales.
How to know if your hashtags are working.
If you have an Instagram professional or business account, down at the bottom of your post you can click on “View Insights.” Scroll down to Reach, and you can then see how many people your post reached From Hashtags. See the example below.
This post reached 46 people through hashtags.
View how your hashtags are performing on multiple posts and try to find trends. See what was consistent in your top performing posts for example, did you post about something relevant or use a certain color.
Pick hashtags for your audience, not just your business.
It is important to not only use the hashtags that are about your business, but also about your target audience. Find out who your audience is and what they are doing. For example, if you sell home appliances, your audience probably isn’t looking at Instagram for an appliance. However, your target audience are those people who most likely have homes. Therefore, they are probably searching the hashtags #dreamhome or #myfirsthome, for example. These are hashtags you would want to use, so you can show up where they already are hanging out and provide them with content of value to them. You can also use hashtags relative to the location of where you work in order to reach your target audience. Although it’s great to use hashtags directly related to your industry, it’s important to also focus on hashtags outside of this and where your audience is, in order to increase your reach. Tip: Do make sure your hashtags are not completely unrelated though, as it could be seen as spammy.
Hashtags on Instagram can be a great tool to use in order to reach your target audience and increase your visibility. Be sure to do your research on how to use them and the right hashtags to use through the tips provided above!
Information sourced from here.