Choosing the best hashtags for photos or stories on Instagram isn’t as easy as it sounds: we often spend more time thinking about what to write in the caption than taking the photo. Whether you are an influencer, the social media manager of a company or a simple user, you will have thought about which hashtags can help you get more likes and new followers. This is also part of the social media game.
First of all, we need to be clear about what hashtags are and why they are so important. Then, we can see how to choose the best hashtags for our photos on Instagram, those that allow us to have more visibility and that are more functional to our goals.
Instagram hashtags are labels that work as post aggregators and make it easier for users to find content related to their interests. They are those words or groups of words that follow the # (pound sign) symbol. They are used by Instagram’s algorithm or by users who search for certain topics on social media, who follow them, or who click from a hashtag contained in a post they are viewing.
The goal of adding a hashtag in the photo is to have more visibility in relation to a specific topic. A well-chosen and relevant hashtag compared to the linked photo can indirectly get more likes, comments and new followers, but its main function is to allow the content to have greater organic reach.
Hashtags can be placed in both Instagram photos and stories. To add a hashtag to Instagram photos, just put it in the caption of the photo we are posting, or in a comment. In stories, you can add them directly to the photo or video.
It is advisable to always be clear with your audience and not deceive them, however, there are ways to hide hashtags on Instagram or otherwise to make them less noticeable. For photos, we can separate hashtags from text by wrapping and inserting punctuation marks, or by writing them in a comment. For stories, on the other hand, we can take advantage of the colors and size of the hashtag and place it in spaces where they blend in with the main content.
There are limits to the inclusion of hashtags on Instagram: 30 in photos and 10 in stories. However, I recommend never reaching the limit: a dozen in photos and up to 3 in stories are enough. Influencers with a lot of followers don’t even need to use a lot of hashtags.
Obviously, to get a greater reach you need a public or business profile, otherwise the content will only be visible to accepted followers and hashtags would also lose much of their usefulness.
Inserting popular hashtags on Instagram allows us to reach a huge audience, but we risk being one of many. If our profile is not that of a very popular influencer, the published photo risks immediately ending up in oblivion and being viewed in a very short time, therefore not reaching high engagement. A little-used hashtag, on the other hand, risks being too niche and therefore having too little coverage.
We need to find the right compromise between popular and minor hashtags, choosing the medium size. The engagement that we usually manage to have with our posts, the strength and relevance of the published content also come into play.
We can choose between different types of hashtags for Instagram, depending on the context and goals of the published content and our profile. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Products or services
These hashtags refer to a specific product or service and are very useful for connecting with fans in that industry. For example, the hashtag #GTA will get a high reach among fans of this video game, or #Netflixaddicted will be able to engage fans of TV series.
Niches & Communities
On Instagram, there are tons of hashtags that are specific to all niches. The #… ofInstagram is present for almost all industries: just dot with the reference keyword, e.g. #catsofinstagram. There are also more elaborate and original hashtags or more specific ones such as #travelblogger: just search for them by exploring the target audience.
Places
The name of the city, country, geographical area, monument or venue can become a hashtag. In this way, it is possible to intercept local communities and gain more visibility among those close to them. A local business should consider this possibility (here are the digital marketing tips for a local business).
Events and festivities
Are we at a football match, a concert or a show? Most likely, there will already be many hashtags created by the organizers or fans to share the experience on social media. This way we can connect with people who have very similar interests to ours.
Acronyms and phrases
Have you ever seen weird incomprehensible hashtags? They are often acronyms that are very much in vogue in specific niches that, if used well, allow you to address a very precise and restricted audience with authority. Then there are phrases by celebrities or related to current affairs that become hashtags and allow the published content to be indexed within a very specific trend.
We often find hashtags under posts or in comments like #like4like #follow4follow. Let’s avoid them because they imply incorrect behavior on Instagram and are often used by bots or individuals who automatically add the follow and then remove it. In any case, these are followers of little value who make up the numbers but do not interact. Quality is always better than quantity.
Some companies with a large following or influencers can launch hashtags to support a specific social communication campaign. This is a very clever strategy that serves to gather fans and promote the brand. We can also use them for our profiles if our message is in line with the one promoted by this hashtag.
We can take advantage of Instagram’s internal search engine to understand the size of a hashtag and to locate related ones. It’s the best way to get inside the head of the algorithm and figure out which ones are considered to be related.
Another indicator can be statistics. If we don’t have a business account, we can observe interactions on previous photos that contained certain hashtags. Otherwise, we have access to much more precise statistics on individual hashtags. We can get the full picture thanks to Creator Studio, the tool that analyzes all the statistics of the Facebook and Instagram page.
Automatic Instagram Hashtag Generators
To our aid come free tools that allow us to automatically and quickly extract the best hashtags for Instagram. I usually use Tags Finder and Sistrix’s Instagram Hashtag Generator. They do all the research for hashtags related to a main one for us. The first has very advanced filters that allow you to refine your search, while the second allows you to insert multiple hashtags together in order to return a more precise result.
It will be up to us to filter from these lists the hashtags that are most relevant to our message and those that are less dispersive and in line with our goals. These very useful tools give us a great deal of hashtags; It will be our job to take care of its quality.
