Instagram hashtag research can be a daunting, overwhelming
task that often lacks structure. How can you be sure which hashtags
are best for your specific brand? Which ones will help you grow
faster? Which will get the most engagement?
This
post was originally published on STB Collaborations,
subscribe
here
.
The biggest mistake
people make when selecting hashtags is making engagement and total
likes a priority over account growth. Try to think about the long
game: is gaining new followers (and potential customers) more
important than getting likes on a single post? Absolutely. Before
starting to build lists of hashtags to use for your content, there
are a few facets of how Instagram operates that you should
consider.
First, keep in mind
that you can use a total of 30 hashtags per Instagram post. That’s
per post — not per caption, or per comment. 30 total hashtags, on
your post, across your comments and caption.
Our advice? Use 30
hashtags every time. Every. Single. Time. If you use anything less
than 30 hashtags, you’re actively hurting the amount of eyes on
your content. 29 hashtags won’t have as much reach as 30
hashtags.
You have to be
careful with how you use those 30, though. Have you ever seen
someone with a long list of hashtags in their caption? It looks
like spam, alienates followers and damages brand image in the
process. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get around this.
The typical caption
on Instagram contains 2–4 hashtags and our goal here is to make
your posts seem as natural as possible. Let’s blend in with the
crowd, rather than reinventing the wheel. Write your usual caption
and include 2–4 of your hashtags. Post the image, then drop the
rest of your hashtags in a comment after posting.
Our suggestion is
to make a list of 26–28 hashtags, leaving room for 2–4 hashtags in
the caption. The important thing here is to just have a total of
30, no matter what. Here’s what that looks like in action:
Your main goal in doing Instagram hashtag research should be
to come up with 30 tags you can use for each post to improve views
on each post.
To further protect
your brand image, there’s a simple way to “hide” your hashtag list
at the time of posting. Long comments are automatically hidden and
shortened so that the newsfeed doesn’t look cluttered when
scrolling. You can take advantage of this by adding several lines
of filler text as shown in the screenshot above and your hashtag
list will be hidden from view. On top of this, once a few people
leave comments on your post, that shortened comment becomes
invisible unless someone clicks the See More Comments button.
With these
considerations in mind, let’s begin our Instagram hashtag
research!
Three Things to
Determine When Thinking About Using a Hashtag on Instagram
Content:
Frequency: How popular is a hashtag? Relevancy: Does
your content fit in with others using it? Spam: Have (shitty)
marketers ruined it for everyone yet?
1. Hashtag
Frequency
The most popular hashtags are almost impossible for small to
medium sized businesses and brands to use effectively. Since they
are used so frequently, your content is drowned out by the masses
and it’s almost impossible to get your content into the Top Posts
section. On top of this, bots and fake accounts will end up leaving
spam comments on your posts — which is not exactly the type of
engagement you want. Since we are prioritizing account growth over
engagement, this means we instead target less frequently used
hashtags. For an account to grow rapi
Please sign-up or log-in to continue reading
Parrity is free forever. Join our open beta today & get lifetime superuser access & other awesome perks! 🤗 🚀
Already have an account?
Sign In
