Improve Your Instagram Hashtag Strategy

Improve Your Instagram Hashtag Strategy

You might think that there isn’t much thought behind the hashtags people use and the impact they can have on your social media presence, but the truth is that, like everything else in digital marketing, great impact comes from small places – like hashtags! It’s about more than just throwing up #cute or #bossbabe on a picture. In order to have useful hashtags that propel your brand forward, you need to implement a strategy that helps you find relevant and impactful hashtags. 

In case you need a little refresher, hashtags are labels that social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube use to group together specific types of content. This lets people easily search for content that they want to find. There is so much content out there that it is hard for users to sift through everything and see the kinds of posts they want to see. That is why hashtags are so awesome! 

 

Finding specific hashtags are important to your success of being found by new users. So, the next time you decide to just throw up some random hashtags on your post, take a pause and consider these steps for improving your Instagram hashtag strategy. 

 

1. First, you will want to compile a TON of hashtags. The more you make early on, the easier it will be in the end because you will be going through and eliminating them along the way. A good start is to create 3-5 groups of 20 hashtags.

2. When creating your groups of hashtags, keep these things in mind: the number of views on the hashtag, the relevance to your brand, what people are searching for as it relates to your business, and what your competitors are using.

3. We like to make sure that each group has a good mix of smaller to larger hashtags and specific to broad categories. If you only use hashtags that have 1 million+ views, the likelihood of your post ranking high on the search result page is probably going to be lower until your following numbers grow. On the other hand, if you are only using small viewership hashtags like 100,000 and below, you’ll find that you have a more specific hashtag for someone really focused on that topic. Having a nice mix is the sweet spot.

4. After you have your list of hashtags, it is important to go through and also make sure the hashtags aren’t banned. This can happen for a number of reasons, but Instagram does this a lot and it can be very unexpected. For example, the hashtag #beautyblogger is banned. If a hashtag is banned, it will say that posts are currently hidden using that specific hashtag. Go through and cross off all of the hashtags on your list that do this when you search them!

5. After you have a nice mix of size and type of hashtags, create different categories for yourself to easily pull and mix and match for all of your posts. You will not want to use the same 30 hashtags on every single post every single time.

6. Don’t forget to refresh your hashtags! We like to go through and do a refresh every quarter or so to make sure we are reaching our greatest hashtag potential!

 

Need help getting your hashtag strategy underway? Drop us a line to get started!