You produce great content. It’s valuable. People need to see it. Wouldn’t it be awesome if people that DID NOT follow you were able to see that creative piece of content you just posted? Enter Hashtags
Instagram Hashtags & Reach
If you are a small business owner using Instagram for your business, you want to know how to increase the number of people that SEE your content for FREE, right?
RIGHT.
What are Hashtags
Hashtags are how Instagram categorizes your posts and organizes them into ‘sectors’. Within a hashtag sector, you’ll see any active stories associated with the hashtag, ‘TOP’ posts tab, and ‘RECENT’ posts tab. You’ll also notice you can follow a hashtag.
Within hashtags you’ll notice similar content.
Hashtag Density is something you will hear people reference and what that means is the amount of posts that use that hashtag. You’ll notice the density appears in light grey next to or under the hashtag. These are the amount of current posts that have been associated with that hashtag. For the purpose of this training, we will be staying 300,000 density or less.
Why should I use Hashtags
Simple answer: You should be using hashtags so additional users can experience and find your content through the Hashtag sectors.
Hashtags are a free way to increase your reach for your posts AS WELL AS great places to find like-minded people (posting similar content) for YOU to also engage with! A great tip is to find hashtags that your ideal clients are using and hop in the hashtag hubs to engage with accounts and posts using the hashtag!
Best recipe: most niche, 2 LARGE scale, 2ish ultra niche [total hashtags ~20-30, never more than 30]
Steps to curate the BEST hashtags
This is the fun part! Finding your best hashtags to use on your posts.
Step 1: Write down as many keywords about what you do, your content bucket topics, and the services you offer as you can. Include your location! Go make your list.
Step 2: Search users with similar accounts to yours and write down the hashtags they use
Step 3: Search large scale hashtags that include the keywords you wrote down. Write down the big hashtags. [anything density 500k – millions of posts]
Step 4: NOW, taking the large hashtags, search each on their own, and see what similar tags are used. Write down the ones 300k and less. I like to write the densities down with my hashtags when I collect them so when going back to use them I know their density.
Step 5: REPEAT for all categories.
One of my favorite things to do during the week, if I don’t have time to hashtag collect, I like to add posts from similar accounts to a ‘collection’ on my instagram. I have a Collection titled ‘HASHTAGS’. This allows me to not lose a post that has similar content to mine to then research the hashtags they used to see if they could be good ones for my account as well. PLEASE NOTE: YOU SHOULD ALWAYS ENSURE YOUR CONTENT BELONGS IN THE HASHTAG YOU WANT TO USE. I’ve been surprised a few times when actually clicking a hashtag and seeing the content in the hub….
Hashtag Hacks
Looking to add hashtags to your posts in an easy way? Here’s a few tips:
- Text Replacement on your phone
- Copy/Paste hashtags from other organizers like notes or Trello (I highly suggest deleting the last few characters from each hashtag after pasting and then selecting the hashtag that Instagram offers you. Some are suspecting that copy/pasting hashtags is messing with coding in the Instagram app and the posts with the copy/pasted code missing hashtags are not showing up in the hashtag hubs.)
- ‘Follow’ hashtags
- Use hashtags that your followers follow!
- Collect hashtags that your fellow people in your niche and ideal clients use!
- Save posts with good hashtags in ‘collections’