I'm sure that a lot of you use Instagram for building your brand, self-promotion or AM promos. I've seen a lot of misconceptions and people sharing completely false info regarding hashtags so I've decided to write a full guide about Instagram hashtags and best practices.
It's a pretty long read and I've published two Youtube videos covering this completely if you want you can check it out here: Ultimate Instagram Hashtag Series
Since there are a lot of people who don't like to learn by watching videos I've also decided to write a short transcript so that you can get the idea what's in these videos and get some general info.
What are you going to learn:
- Hashtag Basics
- How To Help Instagram Categorize Your Page To Get Suggested More Often
- How To Do a Proper Hashtag Research
- How Many Hashtags Should You Use
- What Is Skyscraper Hashtag Strategy & How To Use It
- How To Use Brand Hashtags
- Hashtags In Stories
- Hashtags In Bio
- The Best Place To Put Hashtags (Caption or Comment)
- How To Increase Your Chance Of Getting Ranked For Hashtags
- Banned Hashtags
- Mistakes You Should Avoid
There's also a full transcript available on my website, which you can check out here.
Hashtag Basics:
I'm going to skip basics since I'm sure all of you are already familiar with basics but if you are not feel free to check my videos or read the article on my website.
How To Get More Followers From Suggestions:
First thing you need to understand is that you always want to use hashtags that are relevant to your niche. Instagram uses image recognition to scan your posts and see what’s actually on them.
So your goal is to find hashtags that are closely related to the topic of your account. If you are running a theme or niche page like for example travel, with each new post that uses travel-related hashtags you are letting Instagram algorithm know that your account is about travel and it will start pushing your account to more people that are interested in travel.
With each new post, Instagram is basically learning more about your account and the exact category/ niche you are in so it will start recommending you to other people who showed interest in your niche and associating your account with other bigger pages in your niche.
How Many Hashtags You Should Use:
Now because of this when you start a new Instagram page you should find 25-30 really small (REALLY TARGETED) hashtags that are closely related to your niche. And in the beginning, just use those on the first several posts. If your account is in a really broad niche like just travel, where you post different destinations and all kinds of content than there are a ton of small hashtags that you can use. In this case, find several sets of these small hashtags and use different set on each post.
But as I’ve mentioned already in my previous videos and articles you shouldn’t start the account in a broad niche like that because you will have a much harder time growing. I know a lot of people claim that you should only use up to 5 or 10 hashtags per post and if you use more Instagram will see it as spam, but that’s just not true. Just think of it, if IG wants you to use 5 hashtags only they wouldn’t set the limit to 30. I always use between 25 and 30 hashtags and you should too, because you have a chance to rank for each hashtag you use, and if you use 30 hashtags your chances of getting ranked increase by a lot. To rank for a certain hashtag your post needs to be related, and to receive similar engagement in the same amount of time as the posts which are already ranked.
How To Do Hashtag Research:
Hashtag research is pretty simple but a bit time consuming, the good thing is you basically only need to do it once per each account that you have. You want to go to a broad niche hashtag like for example if you are in travel niche go to #travel if you are in the fitness niche go to #fitness and so on. Now let me show you exactly what you need to do. The account that I’m growing in my 0 to 10k followers challenge is in a Nordic travel niche and if you want to see how I’m doing this step make sure to watch the video.
Video transcript:
As you can see here you will find a list of related hashtags, check one of them and than again you will get a list of related hashtags. Now there are two things you want to write down for each of these hashtags total amount of posts and the lowest amount likes for the top nine posts. If you have time you can also write the average amount of comments but it’s not really necessary. So, here in this example as you can see, there are 348k total posts, and the average amount of likes is about 5k. The lowest amount of likes is 1.2k, if your post gets more than 1.2k likes within the first day you have a chance to rank for this hashtag.
Now you want to find a lot of these related hashtags and write each of them down along with the total amount of posts, and the lowest amount of likes.
Another way to find more related hashtags is to check each picture that’s ranking and see hashtags that they are using.
The third way of doing this is to simply go to search and type your keyword and then go to tags and there you go.
At the beginning of each account I usually just go with the second and third method, which saves me a lot of time. There are some websites that you can use for this, but I don’t really recommend that because almost everyone is using these and you are going to get similar hashtag sets to your competition, in case I find a good tool (paid or free) I will add the link to it here.
Now depending on how broad is your niche you want to find from 30 for really micro niches to 120 for broader niches. You also want to find at least 15-25 general hashtags. In this example specific hashtags would be norway, norwaytravel, visitnorway and so on, these are hashtags that are really closely related to your topic. General hashtags are broader hashtags that are still related like for example travelinggram, traveltheworld, naturephotos and so on.
Skyscraper Hashtag Strategy
Now as I’ve mentioned already at the beginning of each account (first 9-10 posts) you should use about 25 small laser targeted hashtags that are as closely related to your niche as possible and that have from 1-100k total posts and add additional 3-5 general hashtags. This way you will let Instagram know what your account is all about so they can put you into the right category. After that, you should start using the skyscraper or staircase strategy.
Skyscraper hashtag strategy is a pretty simple yet effective method to start harvesting the power of snowballing effect and start going viral. You want to divide hashtags into 6 different groups. First group will be 5 hashtags that range from 5k to 50k total posts, second group 5 hashtags that range from 50k to 250k third group 5 hashtags that range from 250k to 1M in the 4th group you want to use 5 BIG general hashtags, in the 5th group you want to use 3-5 hashtags that are closely related to your actual post 5th group should be different each time since you are publishing different posts.
And in the last group, you want to use 5 hashtags that are really closely related to you niche (it doesn’t matter how many total posts they have) and you want to use this group every time you post (this builds relevancy). When you combine the first 4 groups you get a hashtag set, which should contain 20 hashtags. Now depending on how broad your niche is and the posting frequency you should have at least 2 hashtag sets and if it’s a really broad niche & you are posting several times per day you want to have 4 or 5 sets.
If you post more than once a day you don’t want to use one set over and over again, especially if it’s a broad niche because Instagram can see it as spam. Now this really depends, I have an account for example where I’ve been using absolutely same hashtags over and over again just copy/pasting them for more than a year and haven’t saw any negative results, but I have a friend who got shadowbanned and once he switched to different hashtag sets he started seeing # reach once again. So just to be safe have at least 2 sets.
How And Why This Works:
Let me explain how and why the skyscraper strategy works: Group one contains smaller hashtags which are easy to rank for. If you rank for them you will get more exposure and increased amount of engagement, now with that increased engagement you have a chance to rank for bigger hashtags which are in group 2, this gives you additional exposure and engagement, with that you have a chance to rank for even bigger 3rd group, now once again you get additional reach & engagement which gives you a chance to rank for some of the hashtags from 4th group which are the biggest.
Please note that if you have already established account with more followers and engagement you want to use different total posts range for each group, the example I used is for new or smaller accounts.
In the skyscraper strategy, the most important group is the first one. In the first group, you want to have smaller hashtags that your account have a chance to rank for. So if your posts are usually getting from 50 to 100 likes you want the first group to have hashtags which have top posts that are also between 50 and 100 likes so you have a chance to rank for them and start the snowballing effect.
Once you publish a lot of posts using different hashtag sets you are going to see which set is performing better and gets more reach and engagement and once you do you should use that set more often and discard the worst performing set.
That's all info from the first part of my YT series about hashtags and now let's cover the second part.
Again if you want you can watch the second part here: Ultimate Instagram Hashtag Guide Part 2
Brand Hashtags:
The brand hashtag is simply a hashtag that you invented. I always use my Instagram username as a brand hashtag. These work best on theme/ niche pages and there are two reasons to use them:
- To get free exposure and content
- To build more relevancy
On repost pages, you can simply put your brand hashtag in caption saying for example “use #yourbrand if you want to get featured. People are going to start using your hashtag which will lead to more exposure and it’s also an easy way to discover content for reposting. Since only people in your niche are going to use this hashtag, and you are going to use it in each post this will build more relevancy for your page and Instagram will start pushing your account more as I’ve explained in part one. If you are using my skyscraper hashtag strategy brand hashtag is a part of the group 6.
Hashtags In Stories:
The best way to get more story views is with hashtags. From my experience stories without hashtags almost have no ability to rank on the explore page and can’t rank on the hashtag page. These are great sources to get more story viewers so you want to include hashtags in your stories as well. Just like with post hashtags it’s really important to use relevant hashtags for your stories.
Hashtag limit for stories is 11 but I did some testing and it seems that 2-4 hashtags work the best when it comes to stories. I always include at least one hashtag that’s visible, and if you can’t incorporate more without ruining the look of your stories you can just add the rest by pinching them down so they almost become invisible. I’m going to make another video & article covering how to rank stories and best practices when it comes to Instagram stories, so stay tuned for that.
Hashtags In Bio:
Hashtags in BIO are used to build relevancy. I rarely use them because I haven’t seen much results from them and they can drive people off your page. On some pages, I use my brand hashtag in bio to encourage people to use my brand hashtags and even if someone clicks on it, they will go to my brand hashtag where most of the posts are mine so it doesn’t actually drive people off my page. I don’t recommend adding generic hashtags in your BIO since as I’ve mentioned it doesn’t have much effect and it can drive people off your page.
Where To Place Hashtags (Comment or Caption)
I was always adding hashtags in captions because it was just easier for me, and I thought there’s no difference in reach if you add them in the first comment, but recently we did some testing and it seems that hashtags in caption perform better than in the first comment. Instagram representatives also publically stated recently that it’s better to add hashtags in the caption.
How To Increase Your Chances Of Getting Ranked For Hashtags
Instagram is trying to fight spam really hard and it’s starting to affect hashtag performance as well. I’ve mentioned in my previous video that you should use from 25 to 30 hashtags since it gives you a better chance to get ranked and more exposure. However, on some accounts we’ve noticed that Instagram is limiting hashtag reach when we use 30 hashtags instead of 10 for example, but there’s a simple workaround which seems to boost hashtags performance. Try to include a few hashtags organically throughout your caption and then add the rest at the bottom of your captions like you usually do. I’ve started adding 4-6 hashtags organically in the caption and then the rest at the bottom and it improved my reach a lot on some pages.
Another thing that seems to be working recently is to type all hashtags manually instead of copy/ pasting.
We’ve seen huge improvements on some accounts when we typed everything manually instead of just copy-pasting. Some accounts are completely unaffected by this so you should test it out for yourself.
I don’t think that Instagram is going to punish users for spamming with hashtags because everyone is doing it, but it seems that they are slowly starting to decrease the hashtag reach for some people that simply spam with hashtags and reward people that use them organically. And this is a great way to mix it up and get benefits from both approaches.
On accounts that are affected by this (better performance when typing manually instead of copy-pasting) we’ve noticed that keyboard replacement trick is not affected so keep that in mind.
Banned Hashtags
There are some hashtags that are banned on Instagram and if you include some of them your post is not going to perform very well and if you are using them repeatedly you can get shadowbanned. The best way to find out if the hashtag that you want to use is banned is to actually go to the hashtag page and check it out. Page of banned hashtags looks like this and you should never use it. Make sure to check each of your hashtags manually to see if it’s banned because there are some really weird words that are actually banned (like for example #desk is currently restricted). You can check my video for more info on that.
Common Mistakes
When it comes to mistakes with hashtags the number one thing that I see people doing is using hashtags that are not relevant. I’ve already mentioned that you should only use relevant hashtags but I’m doing it again because it’s really important. Unrelevant hashtags can lower your trust score and lead to shadowban. Make sure that all of your hashtags are closely related to your post.
Another thing that I see people do is that they use huge generic hashtags which they have ZERO ability to rank for. If you don’t know how to find smaller hashtags that you can actually rank for make sure to check the part one of this hashtag guide.
I’ve seen people using hashtags like #follow4follow #likeforlike and so on, which is a really big mistake. These are spammy hashtags that attract fake engagement and followers who are not targeted and are not interested in your content which means they will never engage with your content. This will hurt your engagement rate in the long run and you should avoid hashtags like these completely.
Finally, I’ve seen a lot of people that are shadowbanned because they use banned hashtags and they don’t even know about it. As I’ve mentioned make sure to check each hashtag manually to see if it’s banned and if you used some banned hashtags in the past make sure to edit and delete that hashtag from your previous posts.
Bonus Tips
I’ve mentioned that Instagram uses AI and image recognition to scan your posts and actually see what’s on them but sometimes machines make mistakes. Not a lot of people know this but you can actually use alt text to let Instagram know what’s on your pictures and videos. If you have time make sure to add keyword-rich alt text for your posts since it can really help you rank for hashtags much better especially if their AI made a mistake while scanning your image. Again, I’ve explained this much better in my video so if you want to find out more check it out.
This is not exactly hashtag related, but I thought I should throw it in here, Use Location Tags it has potential to boost your reach, since IG is ranking posts on a location tag as well, and it can’t hurt you in any way so why not. This doesn’t make sense for all niches but it works really well for travel-related niches and local accounts.
That's it for now I hope you liked this and learned something new. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I'm going to answer as soon as I can.
I'm also going to start publishing a lot more ultimate guides and short tips + news about Instagram on r/InstagramGrowthTips so if you are into Instagram marketing and growing Instagram accounts consider following this sub.
Thanks and sorry for any grammar mistakes, English is my 3rd language.
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