How to Choose the Best Hashtags to Use on Instagram

The topic of Instagram hashtags can be fun but also exhausting! There is so much to know about using hashtags on Instagram and it’s much more than just adding random ones that come to your mind first. If you really want your post to get to more people, you should understand at least the basic concept of how hashtags work and how it can help you grow your Instagram account. 

Here is everything you need to know about hashtags!

What are hashtags?

Hashtags are keywords that can be a combination of words, numbers, and emojis, starting with a # symbol. They can be used in posts but also in Instagram stories, and they should be relevant to the content you post. 

Nowadays anyone can follow specific hashtags, which means you can see someone else’s post if they use the hashtag you follow. It’s a great way of seeing relevant posts that you or someone else is interested in and expanding the reach of the post. 

Why should you use hashtags on Instagram?

Hashtags help you to be more discoverable, reach a wider audience and be seen by the right people!

Your post can be found under a specific hashtag you use, meaning it can have a better outreach than the posts without any or too general hashtags. How high on the hashtag page your post will be, depends on several factors like how many likes and comments you have under the post, how large and engaged your community is, and when you shared it. The higher your post appears, the better chances you have to get discovered by people who are not following you yet! And that’s the main goal. To show your content to more people.

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What kind of hashtags to use?

Use relevant and specific hashtags for your brand or business. Try to avoid hashtags that have over a million posts because your content can easily get lost in so many posts and it won’t be seen by many people. The optimal hashtags would be the ones between tens and hundreds of thousands of posts and you can use up to 30 hashtags on a post and up to 10 hashtags on stories. Make sure you don’t use the same hashtags all over again and keep tracking whether they work. If you have a business account (which you definitely should have!), you can access posts insights and see how many impressions you get from hashtags. This way you can evaluate what works best and what doesn’t get much attention through hashtags you used.

I would also recommend you to check what kind of hashtags your competitors are using and what works for them. If that’s not something you would want to do, use the search bar to look for hashtags that are relevant and niche, so you can target the right audience. 

Instagram also has a great feature to show you suggested hashtags or hashtags similar to the ones you are searching for. That makes the hashtag research easier because you can see that if people use one hashtag, you can see other niche ones, too! When you find the hashtags, create a list of all relevant ones and combine them, experiment and have fun with it. Although avoid using irrelevant hashtags, you can appear as a scammer or Instagram might not be showing your posts to many people and we don’t want that.

So what do you think, are you in for the Instagram hashtag game? 

I can definitely say from my experience that hashtags can really help to expand your reach and help to target the right audience. It’s all about trying different ones and seeing what’s working best for your content. And if you find they are not bringing any people in with the hashtags you’re using, do the research again and try different ones. It can only help your outreach.