Ryan LeeIn principle, using hashtags is completely discretionary on Instagram posts and Stories. However, Instagram hashtags are crucial for social media managers. Hashtags are a need if you run an Instagram account for a business or customer.
If you want to expand your reach, boost participation, and boost engagement, you need to master the art of hashtag selection, deployment, and tracking.
No need to panic if it seems like a lot to take in. Whether you’re just getting started with Instagram or want to improve your approach, this book will provide you all the tools you need to succeed. To make sure we’re all on the same page, we’ll review the fundamentals first.
Hashtags on Instagram: What Are They?
All you need to do to use a hashtag is preface your message with the number sign (#) and your words, characters, and/or numbers.
On Instagram, all hashtags are hyperlinked. That means clicking on them will take you to a new page. When you click the link, you’ll be sent to a website that compiles all of the posts on Instagram that have included that hashtag.
The highest-engagement posts appear first when searching for trending hashtags. The remaining content of this page contains links to the most recent entries. You may click any of the posts to read the caption, participate with the content, or follow the account.
The Benefits of Using Hashtags on Instagram
Hashtags are much more than entertaining embellishments to your Stories or post captions. Strategically employing them may yield tangible results for your profile and content.
Increase reach
For years, organic reach has been dropping on Instagram. As a result, marketers are having a harder time promoting their posts and getting their intended audience to view them.
The use of hashtags helps content get seen by more people on Instagram since they help to define the topic of the post. Using this data, the platform may send your posts to the people who have shown an interest in the same subjects.
Help with Finding More
Using hashtags alone to discover new material on Instagram has become more simple over the years. For quite some time now, users have had the option of searching for certain hashtags or clicking on them to view related posts in the Explore tab.
But now, there is a blue Follow button on every hashtag page that users may utilise to track their favourite hashtags. Hashtagged posts will appear in the feeds of Instagram users regardless of whether or not they follow your account.
As a result, more individuals will be exposed to your brand and interact with your social media updates. One click is all it takes for someone to start following your account if they like what they see.
Launch and maintain campaigns
Hashtags tend to be either descriptive or contextual, however this is not a strict requirement. Hashtags may be used to increase awareness of your business or marketing efforts.
Hashtags’ searchability and followability make it simple to track how well a brand or campaign is doing. You can track things like the number of individuals who have engaged with your company on social media or entered your contest by using this method.
Instagram Hashtag Best Practices
Now that you know how useful hashtags may be, you may want to start adding them to your Instagram content right now. Make your hashtag strategy as efficient as possible by following the advice given below.
Know how many hashtags to add
You’re allowed up to 30 hashtags per post and 10 each Story, which is fairly liberal of Instagram. But is it necessary to use the maximum number of hashtags possible?
Put simply, yes, it is true. Our Social Media Lab investigation found that utilising as many hashtags as feasible leads to considerably higher likes. Naturally, more people will find your material through search or discovery—and perhaps they’ll interact too.
What if you just can’t come up with enough hashtags to make it to the limit? You shouldn’t try too hard, and you should never use hashtags that have nothing to do with the topic at hand just to make your list longer.
Tag Instagram posts with hash-tags.
Hashtags may be unattractive, especially if you aim for 30 as some businesses and authors do. Some accounts, out of adherence to this misconception, choose to add hashtags as comments rather than at the conclusion of the post’s caption.
You may simplify your captions and guarantee that they will be discovered by the right people by using hashtags in the comments. But can keeping hashtags to the comments improve things?
According to our research, including hashtags directly in captions improves the engagement and reach of social media postings. The Social Media Laboratory found that including hashtags in a post increased its exposure and number of likes, so there’s no use in hiding them in the comments.
Formulating a Plan for Instagram Hashtags
Establishing a routine for selecting hashtags will help you save time and get more done with each post. Follow these methods to simplify your Instagram marketing plan.
Find popular hashtags
Hashtag brainstorming just before content publication is scheduled to go live is a stressful time sink that may slow down a team. Instead, maintain a list of relevant hashtags that may be used whenever new material is released or scheduled.
You may quickly compile a list of trending hashtags by using one of many simple methods:
- Take a look at the stats for your #hashtags. You can see how your hashtag experiments fared in Agorapulse’s audience report. The best performers may be found by sorting by interactions or average interactions.
- Try browsing Instagram. By using Instagram’s search function, you may quickly try out new variations on your hashtag concepts. In order to help you measure a hashtag’s popularity, the platform will suggest hashtags that are relevant to the one you’re now using and display the number of posts that already use that hashtag.
Brand your hashtags
It’s important that the bulk of your hashtags correspond to terms already being used by Instagrammers. In the end, utilising hashtags that have high search traffic and interaction can help your content gain more visibility.
But some of the hashtags you use should be exclusive to your brand or campaigns. It may be simple to create a catchy hashtag out of your business or campaign’s name. However, they may fail as hashtags if your company name is too generic or if your campaign is too lengthy.