Hashtags are still highly useful, despite what some self-proclaimed social media experts suggest. Unless you have a huge following that eagerly anticipates your posts every day and actively participates with it, you may miss out on reaching your audience if you don’t use the appropriate selection of hashtags when posting a post.
However, in this day of rapidly shifting fashions, purchasing habits, and ideas about what constitutes “cool,” keeping up with hashtags is a job unto itself.
It may be a daily challenge for many social media marketers to come up with effective hashtags. Most people have trouble reaching even a thousand individuals in their target market, despite having sets of hashtags ready to deploy in their calendars.
Hashtags on Instagram: what are they?
To better organise and make searchable the material posted on the most popular social media platforms, hashtags were developed using a combination of letters, numbers, and emojis prefixed by the #symbol.
If you want to see all the Instagram posts tagged with the term “sociallistening,” for instance, just type that hashtag into the search bar.
The benefits of using hashtags on Instagram
There has been a lot of hubbub over the fact that Instagram’s algorithm no longer gives any weight to hashtags. Some of the most successful posts don’t even employ hashtags, but they still use other characteristics like popular audios, trending filters, and more to achieve their high levels of engagement.
We recommend using hashtags into your Instagram marketing strategy for the following reasons:
Increases your visibility
Hashtags were created so that content of all different types (single photos, movies, reels, and carousels) could be organised according to the subject matter they covered. A user may view all posts that use a hashtag by either clicking on the hashtag itself or typing the hashtag into the social media platform’s search bar. Hashtags’ straightforward functionality is what ultimately aids in being noticed by the correct individuals.
Gets people involved in the show
Better engagement may be driven when the appropriate individuals are exposed to the correct material. However, if you make branded hashtags for your company, you can easily find articles and stories about you or a topic that interests you and interact with the accounts that have used them. If you’re a social media marketer on Instagram sharing growth tactics, for instance, we may find you thanks to the hashtags you’ve used and get in touch to offer our assistance, whether that’s by providing more value or by providing more information about our social listening service.
Makes it simple to monitor the competition
There is a good likelihood that you and your rivals are producing a lot of overlapping content due to sharing a target demographic and a product/service. This might include making use of related hashtags while posting online. You can easily monitor your rivals’ Instagram share of voice when you employ a hashtag strategy and incorporate this data into your own planning.
Facilitates the process of content analysis
In many respects, hashtags may be compared to keywords. Hashtag research is similar to search engine optimisation keyword research in that it may reveal what your target audience is interested in and what you can do to better connect with them through your content. If you’re trying to market skincare items, you should probably find out what kind of content people are interested in reading about. This may be used to locate accounts discussing skincare, zero down on top-performing themes, and recognise problems you hadn’t previously considered.
Integrates your physical and online efforts
Hashtags can coordinate your offline and online efforts. For companies actively communicating with their audience and consumers via both physical and mortar locations and the Internet, this is of critical importance. If someone makes a purchase from you offline and then shares that purchase online, you can utilise the hashtag to increase your exposure and reap the other benefits we mentioned.
Now that you know why Instagram hashtags are useful, we can dive into the various hashtag formats used there.
How many times should you use a hashtag on Instagram?
Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post, and Instagram Stories allow up to 10.
Instagram will reject your post with an error message if you try to use more than 30 hashtags in any post.
That’s a lot of potential hashtags for usage across Instagram’s many post types. However, this does not imply that you’should’ employ an abundance of hashtags.
Despite the fact that the ‘correct quantity of hashtags’ has not been discovered or suggested, there are several guidelines you should adhere to:
- Utilize trending hash tags
- When making batches, it might be helpful to draw from a variety of hashtag sources.
- Make groups of hashtags according to categories or topics.
- Maintain consistent hashtag updates.
- Hashtag usage should be tested on a regular basis.
- Evaluate the efficacy of your hashtags.