Hashtags are very important in social media today. If you use it well, it can help you to grow your following to a great deal. Every person who has grown a lot of followers knows how important hashtags are to grow your brand, and everyone uses them to your benefit, and you should too.
If you can make the hashtags work for you, then a lot of people will know who you are, and you will get famous. You will need to be strategic when you want to use your hashtags, but you can learn about it quickly and improve as you keep doing it.
What are Instagram Hashtags?
A hashtag is when you use the symbol #, and you follow the symbol with a letter, number, or emoji. When you use hashtags, it will put your post in a category, and this makes it easy for you to be discovered. If someone searches for specific hashtags, then all the posts that have this hashtag will come in it, and if you put multiple related hashtags to your post, then a lot of people will know who you are, and they will follow you.
Why should you use hashtags?
It can help you reach a lot more people than you usually do and gain more audience. You can use a hashtag on your story or post, and if people like what they see, then they might end up following you. Sometimes the hashtag can create a community, and a lot of people use the same hashtag, and they engage with you. People may do a challenge with a hashtag. If everyone sees that challenge, then they will be motivated to follow you more.
Popular and most used hashtags on Instagram
Instagram breaks down its hashtags into nine different types;
Product hashtag;
These hashtags can help describe the product that you wish to sell. It might just be one word like #shoes, #books, etc. This hashtag is used quite often because it describes the basic things that people wish to show.
Niche hashtags –
Niche hashtags are more specific. They show where you are in your industry. For eg #foodblogger, #travelblogger.
Industry Instagram community hashtags –
There are a lot of different communities on Instagram, and you can find them by using these hashtags. It may be fitness, gardening, or fashion community, and there are many more for any hobby that you might have.
Special event hashtags –
These are also called seasonal hashtags. These may refer to a special occasion or festival. It could also be a season like summer or a winter. It could also be for things like nail polish day or Mother’s day etc.
Location hashtag –
Instagram has an option to use a geotag on your post, but you can still use a hashtag that has your location on it. It is just a better way to make yourself known to more people.
Daily hashtags –
This could be someday of the week attached to something catchy. Eg. #Sundayfunday.
Relevant Phrase hashtags –
This is when you combine a few hashtags together. If you combine a product and a niche hashtag together, that can be a way to communities better.
Acronym hashtags –
You can use popular acronym hashtags on your post. A lot of people might use those acronyms and land up on your content.
Emoji hashtags –
These hashtags can have emojis, and they might not have any words or phrases.
How many hashtags should you use on Instagram?
You can use a lot of hashtags on your post but using too many is not always advisable. You can use thirty hashtags maximum on a post and ten on a story. If your hashtags exceed this limit, then your story will not post. You must test what hashtag amount works best for you. For a lot of people, eleven is a number agreed upon, but most people use anywhere between one and three hashtags per post.
Should you Instagram hashtags in the caption?
When you put too many captions, it can be off-putting because your post becomes very long, but there are ways in which you can hide the hashtags, and the person who views it can only see it when they wish to and choose to see it. After three lines, your hashtags will be hidden. If you have hashtags on a story, then you should pinch it and make it small so that it is not in the person’s face when they view it.
How to find trending hashtags?
You should know all about the trending hashtags because those are the ones you want to put in your posts, making you visible to a larger audience. Instagram will not tell you exactly which hashtags are trending, but you can look at posts that use the hashtags, and if the hashtag has a lot of posts, then you can use that. You can click on the search button on mobile phones, and then you can click on tags. On a desktop, you will need to type the hashtag symbol in the search box.
Choosing the most used hashtags
You can use the most used hashtags because a lot of people are going to see them, but you must be aware that it is very difficult for your posts to be seen in a sea of people who use the same hashtags as well. Hashtags like love, fashion, beautiful are always trending because everyone uses them. It would be a smart idea if you use a good combination of hashtags so that you can reach a wide variety of audiences, and they can all end up following you.
How to find the best hashtags for your brand?
Look at your competition –
You should pay attention to what your competition is doing and what works for them. You do not need to follow everything that they do, but if you follow them closely, you will get an idea of what works for them and use it to grow your own brand. However, you could try to find some new hashtags so that you can create a new audience for yourself instead of trying to get their audiences to follow you.
Look at your audience –
It would be useful if you know the hashtags that your audience uses because if many of them use the hashtag, that means that a lot of other people use it as well. These communities already exist, and you can use that to your advantage and try to get some of them to follow you.
Create a branded hashtag –
You can create a new hashtag by yourself. It can be an authentic way to grow your brand. You would be creating a new community, and you would get a lot of loyal followers from here. You can also create a few challenges related to your hashtag, and a lot more people would know about it, and it can help to make you very famous.
Do not use irrelevant and repetitive hashtags –
Even if you feel that it might be easy to copy and paste your hashtags on all your posts, do not do it because it is a bad idea. Instagram has rules about using hashtags like that, and your account might end up being penalized. It is better to use posts that make sense, and no one likes to see posts that are unrelated to what they want to see.
Conclusion
The most crucial thing is to have faith and keep working towards putting more posts and using everything that you learned from this article to use hashtags to grow. Using the right hashtags is very important because the wrong ones will not do anything for you. They will be there on your posts, but they will not ensure that the Instagram algorithm works for you.
Make sure that you know what the hashtag actually means because a lot of brands try to start trends as soon as it begins, and they end up using some hashtag that gets them in trouble.
Eg. In 2013 burger Pitt got into one such scandal. You can also save a few hashtags for the future and use them when you actually need them and some posts that are related very closely to the hashtag.
