In this lesson you will learn which hashtags to use on Instagram.
When Instagram comes up, the word “hashtag” comes with it. Instagram and hashtags are linked, and one is rather the fuel of the other. Hashtags for Instagram are like petrol for a car.
In the previous article I explained what hashtags are, and now that you know, we can get a better sense of what they are for, how to use them and which Instagram hashtags to pick.
Read on to learn more about which hashtags to use on Instagram.
Want to become an Instagram PRO?
INSTAGRAM COURSE 2019
The most complete course you will find
14 modules – 16 videos – 27 pdf
More than 5 hours of video
Lifetime access to every course update
Read more
Instagram hashtags put your photo into a particular category. A photo can be beautiful, well made and professional, but without the right hashtags it will not win you popularity on Instagram — certainly not at the start when you still have few followers, and not much later either.
Now it is clearer what hashtags for Instagram are for and why everyone talks about them. But in the end, what are Instagram hashtags? A hashtag is a kind of container gathering plenty of news, photos or videos about the same subject.
If you are interested in cooking, for instance, and type the hashtag food into the search bar, you get every image and video carrying that hashtag in the post caption. As you can see in the screenshot below, searching the hashtag food in Instagram’s search bar turns up 1,824,161 posts — so if you fancied scrolling through them all, you would see images and videos about food.
Image from Instagram.com
Instagram hashtags are therefore content organisers.
They can be useful to you if you are using them for personal branding (promoting yourself or what you love), and equally if you have a brand and want to raise engagement with it, or build awareness for a brand few people know.
How do you add Instagram hashtags?
Instagram hashtags are nothing more than keywords preceded by the hash (#) symbol.
So how do you add Instagram hashtags to a post? Very simply. Leave no space between the hash and the word, for instance:
- #food
- #photography
- #fashion
- …and so on.
So what you have to do is take the photo, edit it and, as you are about to publish, write a caption describing it followed by the right hashtags, consistent and relevant to what you are sharing.
You can add up to 30 hashtags to the caption.
If you would rather use an image already in your gallery, just open Instagram, tap the (+) box at the bottom, pick an image from the gallery, edit it and, after writing something to hold the attention of anyone curious, add the hashtags and publish.
Another tip: if you want to hit the target — growing your followers and building a more widely followed Instagram profile — try to use Instagram tags aimed as precisely as possible at the audience you want. The better the hashtags fit both your subject and your audience, the more they pay off. Hashtags help create interaction.
Hashtags are often used somewhat at random, above all by people who don’t know which kinds exist, how to use them and which to choose to improve their visibility on Instagram.
Read on to find out more about the types of hashtag you can choose to use.
Want your Instagram profile to take off?
Want to grow your Instagram followers?
Want to make money on Instagram?
Want to turn your Instagram around?
We can help.
If you can grasp the differences and find the right hashtags to channel your post properly, you will be pleased with the result.
There are, for instance, business hashtags — the ones you create yourself, unique, identifying your brand. You made it and you own it, and the more other people use it, the more visibility it generates for you. A branded hashtag is a unique hashtag identifying a brand or perhaps a campaign it has launched.
An example: McDonald’s Italia put the hashtag #McLovers in its bio.
Why? Because everyone eating at McDonald’s who posts a photo with that hashtag has a chance of appearing with their picture on the McDonald’s Italia Instagram page. The advantage for McDonald’s is that customers are encouraged to post photos on Instagram, which amounts to free advertising.
So these hashtags exist above all to build a bond between brand and audience, on top of brand awareness.
Community hashtags are the ones that revolve around a subject, and they are the best hashtags you can use.
Community hashtags connect the people who belong to that community, or who care about a specific subject. That lets you widen your community, win new followers, get your photos and videos indexed better and be found by people who share your interest.
Plenty of food lovers, for instance, follow the hashtag #foodforlife. If you were a restaurant needing to advertise, or a food blogger wanting to grow your followers, putting #foodforlife in your posts would get you onto that list and in front of the Instagram users following it.
You can also discover other hashtags worth using by looking at the photos you like most on a specific subject, posted by other people.
The more precise they are, the better the final result.
Read on and find out which hashtags to use on Instagram.
Free image from Pixabay
In truth, I could have talked to you about a thousand things, a thousand hashtags, the thousand categories of hashtag out there:
- Instagram fashion hashtags
- Instagram food hashtags
- Instagram sea hashtags
- the most popular Instagram hashtags
- friendship hashtags
- love hashtags
- travel hashtags
These are all categories you can dig through and use, but be careful not to overdo the most popular hashtags: the more used they are, the more they belong to a photo collection that changes fast and is saturated with images, so your photo will be hard to see.
Plenty of web pages hand you the most used Instagram hashtags; we would rather you used your head when adding hashtags and avoided the generic ones, or the ones you find everywhere — massively overused.
Find your own best hashtags, do the research and choose your 30 hashtags to use on Instagram. Hashtags give your posts a clear direction: if your audience is mostly Italian, use Italian hashtags; if it is international, use English ones. It all depends on your goal, what you want to reach and who you are speaking to. Use a maximum of 30 Instagram hashtags, but remember not to use ones above a million posts, at least at the start — or make a mix: 10 heavily used, 10 moderately used and 10 more niche.
In this lesson we have given you an overview of hashtags, and we are sure that if you put this advice into practice you will gradually gain more followers. So you will have grasped how important it is to be informed and to use the right hashtags to increase visits to your profile.
Free image from Pixabay
Conclusion
After learning how to create an Instagram profile and how to improve it, we gave you useful advice on how to grow your Instagram followers. In this last lesson you understood how much hashtags for Instagram matter and you can start putting what you have just read into practice straight away. In the next lessons we will cover other things well worth knowing if you want to become an Instagram professional.
Want to grow the followers on your Instagram profile? Get in touch — we will work out the best Instagram strategy to do what it takes and reach your goal.
Want to sharpen your Instagram knowledge? Get in touch — we will find the course that fits you.
Want to ask us something or just talk? Get in touch — that is what we are here for.