How to develop a winning Instagram hashtag strategy
Social media is powerful. It’s where we share photos of our favourite memories, connect with loved ones, and share memes with friends. It is also the place where you can grow your business, tell your story, and reach your ideal audience. With over 500 million daily active users, it can be hard to stand out on Instagram.
But there are steps you can take to ensure your content shines on Instagram. By developing a winning Instagram hashtag strategy you can truly make sure that your business takes pride of place on the world-leading photo-based social media platform.
While hashtags may no longer be the only thing Instagram uses to determine the relevancy of your content, they still hold a powerful place in your Instagram content strategy.
So, let’s dive into the power of hashtags and how you can develop a winning Instagram hashtag strategy for your business…
What are hashtags?
A hashtag is a combination of letters, numbers, and/or emoji preceded by the # symbol. For example #marketing or #SmallBusinessOwner.
On Instagram, hashtags are clickable.
When you click on a hashtag (or when you use the Instagram search bar to search a hashtag) you will be taken to a page containing all the posts tagged with that hashtag.
How to use hashtags on Instagram
You can add up to 30 hashtags to an Instagram post. These can either be added to the end of your caption or in the comments of your post!
Adding hashtags to your post will increase your reach by allowing your post to appear on the search page for each hashtag you have used.
While it sounds simple, there is more to creating a winning hashtag strategy than just whacking a bunch of hashtags on the end of your caption.
If you really want to make sure your Instagram posts are reaching your target audience then you need to develop a hashtag strategy.
Here’s how you can do just that…
How to create a hashtag strategy for Instagram
Hashtags are a powerful way to expand your reach as a business. Through the use of hashtags, you can reach new people who could, in turn, become customers or clients.
But how do you find the right hashtags to reach your ideal audience?
At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I have nailed my hashtag strategy when it comes to helping my clients get in front of their ideal audience on Instagram.
Here at Fika Digital, our process for creating a winning hashtag strategy for Instagram looks a something like this:
- Define your core content themes
- Gather a list of hashtags under each of those content themes
- Organise those hashtags by low, medium, high, very high, and viral search volumes
- Use and review performance
- Repeat this process every three – six months (you’ll be surprised how quickly hashtags change!)
Define your core content themes
The first thing I recommend you do is define your core content themes. There’s no point doing hashtag research if you don’t first know what it actually is you want to focus on.
If you frequently post content to Instagram then you hopefully will already have your content themes mapped out. If not, don’t worry! That’s what we’re here for right now.
To define your content themes, first consider what are the main topics that you discuss, or that both interest your audience and are relevant to your brand. These core content themes should be high-level topics that can be broken down into more specific topics.
For example, the content themes for a company selling eco-friendly cleaning products may be cleaning, home, environment. These topics can then be further broken down into sub-topics or related keywords.
Once you’ve got a keen understanding of your core content themes and sub-topics, you should then be able to begin your hashtag research.
Gather a list of hashtags for your content themes
Now that you’ve plotted out your content themes and related keywords, it is time to start developing hashtag banks for each of them.
When it comes to pulling together a list of hashtags, I find that manually doing the work is the best way forward. You could use a Hashtag app or website but by doing so, you run the risk of collecting irrelevant or outdated hashtags, as well as missing potential hidden gems.
Instead, open up Instagram – you’ll want to choose to open Instagram on a desktop over your phone. Trust me, using the web app on desktop will be far easier… and your thumbs will appreciate the break from the constant tapping and scrolling!
In the search bar at the top, begin typing your content themes and keywords with a hashtag (e.g. # + keyword).
For instance, if you identified one of your keywords to be Indoor Plants then you will want to enter #indoorplants. Before you press enter, a drop-down list of suggested hashtags will begin populating.
Click through this list of suggested hashtags to see what posts tend to perform best for each of the specified hashtags. If they look like they are relevant to you and your industry, make note of the hashtag and the number of posts (AKA the search volume).
Repeat this process for all of your identified keywords, remembering to also look at related hashtags in the drop-down list of suggested searches.
Once you have done this, you can conduct further keyword research by looking at what hashtags other Instagram users in your industry use – you can do this by analysing the hashtags used by your competitors and by influencers in your niche, or by looking at posts for your chosen hashtags and seeing what other hashtags people are using.
Don’t forget to do your due-diligence everytime you find a hashtag by checking if it is relevant to your industry.
By the end of this task, you’ll want to have a long list of hashtags for each of your content themes. These hashtags should contain a mix of low volume hashtags that have only a small number of posts under them, and high volume hashtags featured by millions of posts.
Organise your hashtags by search volume
Wondering why I asked you to jot down the number of posts each hashtag has? Well, you’re in luck because this next step is all about those numbers!
The number of posts each hashtag has is an indication of that hashtags popularity. The higher the number, the most often it is used. This suggests that these hashtags are also most likely to be searched, and seen, by other Instagram users interested in your chosen topics.
While going after the hashtag with the most posts next to it might seem desirable, this isn’t always the best course of action to take. Yes, it could get your post in front of 831,395,672 people. But it also reduces the longevity of when your post will be seen in the hashtag search results.
High volume hashtags have hundreds, if not thousands, of posts being published every single second. This reduces the chance of your post being seen, unless you’re lucky enough to land in the Top posts view.
So, what should you do instead?
If you’re someone like me, who finds joy in organising things, then you’ll enjoy this next step.
Before using your hashtags, you want to split them into five categories based on search volume:
- Low – less than 25K posts
- Medium – 25K-150k posts
- High – 151K-500K posts
- Very high – 501K-999K posts
- Viral- 1M+ posts
This will help you easily see the popularity of each hashtag so that you know which hashtags to use for your next Instagram post.
At Fika Digital, we have a shiny Hashtag Database that we use for our clients. This database is somewhat of a hashtag holy grail containing all possible keywords for all of our client industries, interests and topics.
To organise hashtags by search volume, I like to create a separate Google Sheets tab for each of my content themes. Then within each sheet, I have a table with columns split by search volume. Within each column, you’ll find the related hashtags, organised by search volume, for that content theme.
Use your hashtags and review performance
Now it’s time for the fun part!
You should now be ready to put all that research and hard work into action by using your hashtags on your next post.
This is where organising your hashtags by content theme and popularity comes into the play. First, you want to navigate to the hashtag bank that best suits the post you are about to publish. For example, if you’re writing about your journey as a small business owner, you may want to choose hashtags under your “small business” content theme.
You might find that more than one content theme, or category, relates to your planned post and that’s okay! You can choose a mix of hashtags from all of the content themes that relate to your post. But try not to dilute it too much or else your post may not be as effective.
As a general rule, try to stick to no more than two themes at any one time, and always keep in mind what you want the goal of your post to be. This will help you ensure relevancy and quality when publishing content to Instagram.
When choosing which hashtags to use on your post, make sure you take a selection of hashtags from each volume bracket, ensuring you have a mix of different volume hashtags. When doing this, prioritise the low and medium volume hashtags and try to use more of these in your post.
Using a mix of different volume keywords will make sure your post appears on the really popular hashtags where lots of people may see your post but it’s more competitive, and less popular hashtags where fewer people will see your post but you have an increased chance of engagement.
Instagram lets you use a maximum of 30 hashtags. Do not use more than 30 hashtags in any one post. To keep your posts looking neat and tidy, you can also add the hashtags as a comment on your post immediately after hitting publish, rather than including them in your caption.
Once you’ve published a few posts using your new hashtag strategy, you will want to analyse your results!
If you have a Business or Creator account, you can take a look at your hashtag performance in the Post Insights on Instagram. Use this to determine which posts get the most impressions from hashtags.
Spend time analysing these insights to find what works well for you, what needs improvement and then test/try again!
Repeat this process every 3-6 months
Social media is a fast-moving industry. As a result, new hashtags are constantly popping up and seemingly underground hashtags can rapidly grow in popularity.
This means that your hashtag bank could soon become outdated and you may find that hashtags that once worked for you are no longer harnessing the results you expect, or want to see. You will want to refresh your hashtag strategy every three – six months to make sure that you are using the best possible hashtags for your content.
When refreshing your hashtag strategy, you should also re-check the search volume for your existing hashtags so you can see whether any hashtags need to move to a different column based on their current popularity.
Final thoughts on creating a winning Instagram hashtag strategy
Hashtags aren’t the be all and end all of Instagram. With that said, there is a reason hashtags exist within Instagram’s interface… and it’s all to benefit you, the person posting!
From extending your reach and helping your posts get in front of your ideal audience to helping Instagram’s algorithm to better categorise your account and improving your social SEO, the power of hashtags are not to be ignored.
You should now be ready to pull together a winning Instagram hashtag strategy for your business!
Our team at Fika Digital are also here to help you further harness the powers of Instagram for your business. Whether you want help developing your hashtag strategy, or you’re looking for a specialist team to manage your social media strategy, we’ve got your back.
Get in touch to book in a chat and learn about the various ways that we can support you and your business with social media.