The No-Nonsense Guide to Using Instagram Hashtags in 2020

The No-Nonsense Guide to Using Instagram Hashtags in 2020

If there has been one element of Instagram marketing that has remained consistently important since its inception, it has to be hashtags. Instagram has always used – and it still does to this day – hashtags to serve its users what they are looking for.

And this is precisely why hashtags can be a great tool for you to reach your target audience, easily and quickly. But it’s easier said than done. Let us walk you through the entire process of using hashtags and everything else you need to know about them.

Importance of Using the Right Hashtags

As per studies, posts that have at least one hashtag get 12.6% more engagement on an average than those without any hashtag. While Instagram’s algorithm has kept changing consistently from time to time, one of the few things that has always remained important is the use of hashtags.

Hashtags are a very useful element of Instagram’s algorithm because they help it organize the posts on the platform, and put them in front of the right users. They are basically a way to categorize the posts.

When you use a particular hashtag in your post, that post appears in the search page of that particular hashtag. When users search for the exact hashtag you included in your post, their search result would pull up your post too, though a few factors may influence its position in their search result.

But the bottom line is that hashtags help you get exposure on your posts, and help you reach your target audience. Using the right and relevant hashtags would help more users find your posts – including those that don’t follow you or haven’t visited your profile ever – which may help you get both more engagement and followers.

However, finding the right hashtag can be challenging for those not familiar with Instagram marketing. So let us help you understand how to go about finding the right, relevant hashtags for your posts that your target audience may be searching for.

How to Find the Right Hashtags to Use?

Well, that’s really a broad question, with the answer being fairly broad as well. Simply put, you need to use the hashtags that are relevant to your industry while trying to go as niche as possible.

Don’t worry, we will get more detailed and specific on that. Now, what most users or marketers trying to grow their engagement on Instagram forget is that simply using the most popular hashtags in their industry isn’t the best way to approach hashtags. Hashtags like #dogs and #gym are way too overused, and you will struggle to get yourself found using these hashtags.

On the other hand, if you choose a more niche hashtag based on the exact topic you’re posting about, you’re sure to not only get more eyeballs on your post, but also a significantly higher level of engagement. So for instance, if you’re talking about a French Bulldog, then you must consider going with something like #frenchie instead of #dog. Although the former is much less popular, it attracts more interested users and doesn’t make your post get lost in a sea of generic posts.

This approach helps generate a much better level of engagement, as users often converse on such posts.

With that said, here are a few tips to finding the right, relevant and potentially engaging hashtags for your Instagram posts.

Researching Your Audience

This is going to be your foundation for finding the right hashtags. Just making hashtags out of thin air isn’t going to help you much, as not many users may be searching for that hashtag and so you would be unlikely to attract any users or engagement.

However, if you do some research and find some popular, niche-specific hashtags in your industry, it can work out pretty well for you in terms of getting exposure and generating engagement.

A good way to start here is to check out the posts of some of the top accounts in your niche, and research which hashtags have they been using. Going through the posts and hashtags of popular users and influencers in your niche is a great way to discover some hidden gems too.

Get Ideas from Instagram Itself

Yes, the search bar of Instagram can be quite a tool in itself when it comes to finding the right hashtags in your niche. A great way to find related and popular hashtags in your niche based on the hashtags you have come up with is to put it into Instagram’s search bar, and then select “tags” when you see the dropdown menu.

This will pull up a lot of related hashtags in your niche that are also some of the most popular. This will not only give you a lot of ideas, but will also serve as the base of further research for you as you can take each of these hashtags and do further research either through the “tags” method we just discussed or through other ways.

Using Social Media Tools

There’s a plethora of tools out there that help you with your Instagram marketing, and finding hashtags in particular. If you’re looking for a more complete tool with lots of other features too, something like Hootsuite may interest you.

Later is another tool that lets you find popular hashtags as well as save them.

Optimizing Your Hashtags

Finding the right hashtags to use in your posts is great, but you could take things a step further by optimizing the use of hashtags. We here at Fan Explozion believe that you should try to come up with a strategy that helps you use hashtags in the best way possible, so that the engagement you gain through them keeps increasing over time.

Optimizing your hashtags should be a part of your strategy. You can find information about how your hashtags have performed for you in the past in the native analytics offered by Instagram itself.

Based on that, you would be able to figure out what type of hashtags have worked best for you, so that you can tweak your research to find more of them. There are also paid tools like Later that we mentioned above that allow you to do this in a very detailed way, such as providing you a lot of insight about how each of your hashtags have performed.

This kind of analysis can go a long way in helping you optimizing your use of hashtags.

Getting Into the Top Results with Your Hashtags

If you get into the top results with a relevant, fairly popular hashtag, you can expect to get a lot of exposure and targeted followers too. The top results are the posts that appear at the top of the search results when the users search for a particular hashtag. These posts get the most exposure from users searching for the hashtag.

Getting into top results isn’t easy – especially for the more popular hashtags – but it can be done for some of the less popular ones which can also get you a lot of engagement and exposure. The two main factors that can shoot your hashtag post into the top results is the amount of engagement your post with that particular hashtag gets, and how quickly it gets that exposure. If you don’t think you would be able to achieve this organically or naturally, you can consider buying Instagram likes for your posts with that hashtag that you want to rank in the search results.

If you get a decent amount of exposure very quickly for a particular hashtag relevant to your post’s content and profile, it can make your post very likely to become a top post for that hashtag. And this could mean a ton of engagement and targeted followers for you.