Twitter might be the first one to start dating with ‘Hashtag’ but ‘Hashtag’ seems to be having a serious relationship with Instagram lately. Hope you know what I mean!
Instagram hashtags are not only useful for making your content more visible to the target audience but also helps in gaining more followers and increasing engagements. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?
In comparison with the other social media platforms, Instagram has a high rate of successful brand awareness and getting more customer engagements. But to make this work for you, you’re definitely going to need a sound Instagram hashtag strategy. For which you the below tips can be helpful:
Researching for hashtag is a must:
You must do good research and choose your hashtags wisely in order to reach the target audience. Using random hashtags will never work. Here are little tips on how you can search for tags:
Search your key-words that you’re currently using on Instagram and check out the top suggested Instagram hashtags coming in the search results. By that, you will get an idea about relevant tags to use for making your post more searchable.
For example, if you search with any keyword, like if you search with the hashtag “#content”, and then Instagram shows all frequently used hashtags related to the keyword content.
Keep an eye on the others, what the other related posts are using keep looking for that because it will give you an idea about the trend that is going on for hashtags.
In the below example, check out the kind of hashtags this brand has used. These can give you an idea about what type of hashtags will be relevant for your posts.
Try to go for less:
Always try to use the hashtags that have been used lesser times, because the ones which are overused have too many posts tagged to them already thus making your post’s competition high. But if you use the ones which have been used less then the competition of posts will be less, and chances of engaging the target audience with your post will increase.
Take a look at the below picture, the 2nd hashtag in the drop-down list “#contentcreationtips” has been used a lesser number of times than the 1st one “contentcreation”. So, if you use the 2nd suggested hashtag instead of the 1st one, then your post will have lesser competition.
Follow the leaders:
Another way to find appropriate Instagram hashtags is to follow those Instagram profiles which are right now having a good amount of followers and engagement and are having the same target audience as you. This way you can see what hashtags they are using and you can use them too.
Like see below, at first here I searched with hashtag “contentmarketer”:
Then I choose the post that got most likes in the given results:
It can help in influencing fan engagements
Now let’s talk about the main interest area, getting more engagement through Instagram hashtags. As you already know that the purpose of hashtagging your posts on Instagram is to make it easier for the target audience to find them.
And as you might know as well that some hashtags are just more popular i.e. more searched than the others, so if you use those in your posts then people will see your post in search results.
A little disappointment on this is that using popular hashtags will only lead to additional engagements and likes, not long-term engagements and followers. But if you use the right tags that are more relevant to your posts then the actual sustainable growth will come.
Just see the below picture, the 1st suggested hashtag “#contentmarketing101” has more popularity than the 2nd suggested hashtag “#contentmarketingtip”. But you shouldn’t choose the hashtag only based on popularity, choose the one which is most relevant to your post.
Some Useful Tips:
- For searching tags that are related to your brand you can use Websta or IconoSquare, these are free online tools.
- You can also try going for the conventional way to search for right hashtags, you know… directly searching key-words on Instagram and seeing their popularity.
- But do remember that Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags so choose wisely. Also, the popularity of words keeps on changing, so make sure to recheck your Instagram hashtags every few months.
- Also, try to use hashtags in your Instagram stories as well. That will lead to more viewers and potential followers.
Conclusion
I hope this would have helped you to strategically search for the right kind of Instagram hashtags for you. Share in the comments section below, how you manage both the popularity and relevance of hashtags that you use.