It was October 2007 when Nate Ridder, from San Diego, started sharing posts with the hashtag #sandiegofire. He wanted to inform people about wildfires in the area. The hashtag is 14 years old, and so far, it became a social media phenomenon.
It is now hard to find a social media post without a hashtag, especially on Instagram and Twitter.
Hashtags on Instagram are best-known as an effective way to grow your engagement and following, but practices are constantly changing. You can engage with specific hashtags and stay updated on a current trend; you can use your hashtags to promote a new service or product.
There are so many questions and doubts about Hashtags strategies on Instagram. We prepared 8 strategies for optimizing your hashtags right now.
It might look like the right thing to do – add as many hashtags as you can think of, but it’s wrong. Adding random hashtags can slow down or even ruin all your efforts. Stick to those that are relevant for your niche and your business.
The Instagram app allows you to check your hashtags’ performance every time you launch a campaign.
Reach your Instagram data from the app by selecting the post, then open it, tap view insights text below, and you will get to a page full of data. You will find ‘From Hashtags’ under the impressions metric. Check how many people have seen your IG profile post through hashtags you used.
Too many hashtags in your captions look spammy and untidy.
Instead, post your hashtags in the first comment. This is a simple way to make your caption the star of the show. By putting hashtags in the first comment, you keep the image caption clean and allow the caption with hashtags to disappear after few comments.
Once you have found a selection of relevant hashtags,
check the volume of posts for each of them.
If a hashtag is too popular or has too many posts, your
the new Instagram post will be „buried” in seconds; On the other hand, if a hashtag is too small, you probably won’t gain any engagement.
This is why hashtags with between 10k-300k posts work the best
for you. There is some
activity around the hashtag, but not too much.
Create a hashtag for your brand
Think of creating your brand hashtag as you will be optimizing hashtags to increase traffic and make your brand more discoverable.
What is the best way to do it? The hashtag should be as simple as your business name and easy to remember. Search it through to check if anyone else is already using it. If you have a common business name, add your location or a phrase.
Don’t copy competitor’s hashtags
Copying your competitor’s hashtags is not recommendable. Of course, checking out what your competitor is using is a great way to start your Hashtag research. Be unique, set yourself apart, select tags specifically for your business and your audience.
Change hashtags
Change your hashtags every few weeks or months. If you find your set of hashtags is no longer bringing you engagement, consider switching up your set. Start by changing ten hashtags to see if that will make a difference.
Include hashtags on Instagram Stories
Adding hashtags to your stories will help to make your content noticeable. You can do it in two ways – the first one is to use the hashtag sticker, and the second one is to use the text tool and the # symbol to type out the hashtag, just like on a photo or video post.
Mila Z
