On posts, stories or in your bio, hastags are powerful means to pump up you overall profile visibility and user engagement. Throughout the last couple of years, Instagram has added more and more features which can help you make more relevant choices on the usage of hashtags in your marketing or personal branding strategy.
Here’s a simple, yet effective strategy which will make a difference on your growth.
Where to find them
Luckily Instagram is great at suggesting hashtags for you. Plus it allows you to see how popular each hashtag is.
The best way is to continuously monitor your competition and your target audience. See which hastags get more engagement and which are more relevant.
Later also has great features for suggesting and managing various hastag lists for your content strategy.
Other than that, you could use TagsForLikes.com to get sets of the most popular hashtags on Instagram.
How many to use
There’s not a fixed number. The maximum allowed are 25-30. While some recommend taking advantage of all of them, others suggest using no more than 5-10 hastags on a single post.
The ideea is to be relevant. So instead of just throwing random hastags at the end of each caption, just to fill up to capacity, it’s better to use less, but more relevant ones for your type of content or business.
Where to use them
On posts – Of course. I suggest using only 1-3 in your caption and posting the others in a comment. That way you don’t clutter the description, but you get the same impact.
On stories – While it is not advised to use 30 hastags on a single story, yes, they work the same. When you follow or search for a particular hastag on Instagram you will be able to see both posts and stories using said hashtag.
In your bio – This recent feature allows you to make your profile description even more functional. You could use your branded hashtag or promote your community that way.
How to use them
One essential tip is not to use the same set of hastags for all your posts. Try to switch them up from time to time as to not seem like you are spamming.
Of course it is time consuming to input 30 hashtags on each of your posts. That is why you could save your lists as text files on your smartphone and just copy/paste them when you need them.
Create a mix. Don’t go just for the most popular hashtags (10 mil. – 100 mil). Your posts won’t have time to rank among so much noise. Instead also use more narrow scoped ones (100 k – 1 mil.) or specific (10 k – 100 k) for better engagement and visibility.
Remeber to measure! If a hashtag gets a lot of activity that doesn’t imply that you will get a lot of engagement from it. Instagram insights allow you to see how much reach you get from hashtags. That way you can continuously optimize your strategy.
Good luck!
Marele Diminutiv 