The Beauty of Hashtags

If you’re on Instagram and want to build your business, then you need to be using hashtags. Hashtags will make your content easy to discover, they’re a way of cataloguing and organising content. Everyday millions of hashtags are being used, helping people find beautiful, new inspiring content on Instagram. There are whole galleries of images related to specific hashtags ready for you to scroll through and enjoy. That’s the beauty of hashtags.

A post with just one hashtag will average at least 12.9% more engagement than posts without any. Using hashtags on your posts and stories will help you improve your engagement and build a community around your business. As long as they are targeted and relevant then you’ll find hashtags are an incredible way to discover new audiences.

Are you using hashtags to find inspiration?

Try it. Once you’ve found interesting content via hashtags it’ll be so much easier to make it work for your business.

Back to your business – which hashtags should you use?

The choice seems endless when you start off, but we can help you narrow it down to a list that’s relevant to your business and helps reach your target audience.

The hashtag mix you choose will be unique to you, your business, brand and target audience. It does take time to build your list of hashtags and you’ll need to vary it for each post to make sure your hashtags are relevant.

The good news is some hashtags are useful for every post, like your business name and brand, location and key interests of your target audience. Others will be relevant to that specific post.

This food blogger has posted a brightly coloured, beautifully eye catching picture with a simple caption and used hashtags to describe the image. Choosing hashtags like #smoothiebowls #freshfruits #breakfastbowl helps the target audience discover the post.

Where do you find hashtag inspiration?

Start with Instagram itself. If you use the Explore function you’ll soon notice that Instagram helpfully suggests useful hashtags, related to the one you’ve just searched for. At a glance you can see how many posts use each hashtag so you can make sure you get a good mix on your posts.

Beware of the really popular hashtags, anything that gets over 1 million posts probably isn’t worth using, as your post will quickly disappear from the screen as more are added.

Aim for a mix of popular hashtags around 60k and not so popular hashtags that have around 10k posts.

If you use a scheduling tool you’ll find they offer services that will help you find hashtags, Instagram strategists like @365daysocial often post monthly suggestions. Look at what your competitors are doing, and leading brands in your industry for inspiration.

How many hashtags are too many ?

You can use up to 30 hashtags per post and up to 10 in your stories. If 30 feels like too many to start off with go for a minimum of 11, studies have shown that using 11 # will improve your engagement by up to 79%. Experiment with your hashtags – social media is all about testing and learning, you’ll need to see what works for your business.

Where to put your hashtags?

In your posts you can add them into the comments of your post, some people prefer this as it keeps your post looking neat. Or you can add them in your post caption.

Agorapulse conducted a study which analysed the performance of hashtags, they found that adding hashtags in your post caption increased Likes by 9.84% and reach grew by nearly 30%. All the details of the study have been reported by Social Media Today.

Hashtags in Stories are just as useful, you can add one in as a graphic @ and then add them into your story as text. Space is limited in Stories so you can hide them behind your main text box or location tag, this will mean your Story still gets your message across. Or you can use the colour matching tool so you change the text colour to match the background of your image and then shrink the tag so it’s far less obvious. Plann, an Instagram scheduling tool, explain how to use this trick.

Do you want some help with your hashtags or advice on your Instagram strategy? Talk to us – we’d love to help.