Hey, Instagram star. Have you heard that the secret to the gram is hashtags? If not, buckle up, because our guys are about to take you on a journey to show how those funny little pound signs can ramp up your Instagram marketing efforts and boost those engagement levels.
Hashtag Magic: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Your Instagram Strategy
Here we go. Hashtags are actually Instagram fairy dust. Sprinkle them on your posts and watch them grow spirals into fame. No, they’re not, dummy. Hashtags are so much more than words with a # and some fatality in front. Used correctly, they are the Rosetta Stone to Instagram success.
Research by the social-metrics company Simply Measured found that posts with at least one hashtag captured an average of 12.6% more engagement than posts without. Sweet. But it gets better. and to greater use, hashtags leveraged to target the right audience and increase your visibility, and eventually to build communities around you.
Cracking the Hashtag Code: The Science Behind the
After all, you might wonder, it’s just a hashtag; surely it’s not that complicated? Trust me, it is. A really good hashtag strategy needs to come together like a great orchestra.
First of all, you need to know the difference between the various hashtag categories. There currently exist, as Instagram expert Jenn Herman tells it, generally five flavours of hashtags: branded, community, campaign, descriptive, and trending. An effective strategy amounts to a creative combination of all five, one that reliably maximises your reach and engagement.
Then there’s the issue of how many hashtags you use per post (‘up to 30’ per post, Instagram says)—still, that doesn’t mean you have to max out every time. According to fascinating research by Track Maven, the magic number was nine hashtags per post when it comes to getting the best engagement possible. Again, this number is going to vary from niche to niche and industry to industry, so the best way would be to test and see what works best for you.
Hashtag Hunting: Unearthing the Golden Tags for Your Brand
OK, so now we have the basics covered. Let’s move on to how to find the ideal hashtags for your brand. This is where things get fun, because with a systematic approach you will be able to find hashtags that can dramatically increase your exposure and engagement.
That brings us to what might be the most potent hashtag-hunting tool of all: competitor analysis. In its 2021 Instagram report, Sprout Social says that looking at your competition for hashtag inspiration can give you clues to what works in your niche, but to get better results than if you only copied their choices, you’ll need to tweak the hashtags in a way that makes them uniquely yours.
Another potentially game-changing idea is hashtag communities: groups of people who use and follow hashtags for their specific interests. By interacting in and known as a’micro-influencer’, Later offers such interactions, and the genuine human interaction you attain in exchange might just be invaluable.
The Hashtag Goldmine: Striking It Rich with Strategic Tag Selection
Now, for choosing the correct hashtags? Well, it’s actually not about making them popular—that could even harm more than good. Hootsuite writes that there is, in fact, a mixture of popular, moderately popular and niche-specific hashtags that needs to be used.
Pro tip: among all hashtags with 100 posts, the ideal ratio is just 1 engagement (a like or comment) per 100 posts. This is the unicorn of the hashtag world: active, but not stale.
Don’t underestimate location-based hashtags either: Instagram says 70% of posts with location tags get greater engagement than those without. So, if you’re a local business or looking to target a certain place, geo-tags are your secret sauce.
Hashtag Alchemy: Turning # into Gold for Your Brand
Alright, so you’re finally a hashtag ninja. But a ninja who just goes around stabbing random people is no better than a David Hasselhoff impersonator. Let’s get sophisticated. Let’s talk aggressive hashtagging with some expert hacks that’ll have Mumchun jamming ska while drinking possum wine.
A good strategy is to coin a branded hashtag for yourself and include it in every Instagram post. Sprout Social has found that 70% of all Instagram hashtags are branded. The success of branded hashtags can be seen through Red Bull’s hugely effective #givesyouwings campaign or Adobe’s #Adobe_Perspective.
But here’s the catch: you need to give users a reason to use your hashtag—a contest, maybe a chance to be featured on your page, or access to exclusive content. Whatever it is, offer something that users can’t resist.
Hashtag Wizardry: Casting Spells of Engagement with Advanced Techniques
And now for a few next-level hashtag hacks. Take the ‘hashtag pyramid’. As Instagram expert Alex Tooby advises, it’s about ‘honey-potting your hashtags’: you should use a combination of broad terms, mid-size hashtags, and niche-specific hashtags in order to reach as many people as possible without alienating your key target audience.
Another transformational strategy is story hashtagging. Rather than simply tagging your posts with keywords, use hashtags to tell a story or send a message. For example, a fitness brand might tell a customer’s story using a sequential series of hashtags such as #FromCouchTo5K #RunningJourney #ProgressNotPerfection.
Hashtag Analytics: Measuring the Magic of Your Strategy
Okay, numbers time. Because as much as we all love those shiny little likes, if you aren’t showing up in your metrics the right way, you are just, literally, flying blind. And data is everything on Instagram.
Iconosquare says the data points to watch are reach (how many unique accounts saw your post), impressions (how many times your post was seen) and engagement rate, as measured in likes, comments and shares divided by reach. But don’t stop there. Take a good look at the performance of your hashtags over time to determine trends and patterns.
The Crystal Ball of Instagram: Predicting Success with Hashtag Analytics
Here’s the fun part: with the right analytics tools, you can also figure out which hashtags will work well for your brand. Platforms such as Keyhole and RiteTag use AI and machine learning to look at hashtag usage patterns and tell you which ones will work best for you.
However, as shown in its 2014 report, analytics is about more than crunching numbers; it’s about using insights to constantly optimise strategy. Simply Measured reported that the average brand that analyses and adjusts a hashtag strategy sees a 39% rise in engagement.
Conclusion
And now you’re an Instagram wizard! Witch, whatever. We’ve adventured through the hashtagged world and discovered how these symbols can make us masters of marketing on Instagram. We’ve learned all about the science of hash tags, covered the advanced technique, and now we know how to use stats to leverage it all. We can become at least a little bit better at Instagram. May the hashtags be with you.
By the way, you shouldn’t be using hashtags simply to be trendy. Instagram SEO can work wonders and take you from zero followers to all the way up to a million (super-fast if you know how to do it). If you’d like to find out more, read ‘How To Skyrocket Your Instagram Popularity With Simple Tricks’ over on Lifehack.org.
FAQs
How often should I update my hashtag strategy? There’s no definitive answer to this question, but we generally recommend giving your hashtag strategy a monthly ‘check-up’ to see if any updates are warranted, although you might want to adjust more frequently if you have a time-sensitive campaign or operate in a rapidly evolving industry.
Can I use the same hashtags for every post? You could consider keeping a running list of go-to hashtags, but that’s not the most effective way to do it. Now that you publish at least one post per day, every post should have a selection of hashtags specific to that content. Thus, the combination of hashtags and content should reach the most appropriate audience for each one of your posts.
How do I know if a hashtag is too popular or too niche? A good barometer of a decent hashtag will be the number of posts—if it’s in the millions, it’s probably too competitive; if it’s only a few hundred, it’s too niche and not worth using. A hashtag should produce thousands to hundreds of thousands of posts for a good amount of reach and non-competitiveness.