How To Use Instagram Hashtags For Business

Are you wondering which hashtags your business should be using on Instagram? Want to know how many hashtags to use for the best results? In this article, I will talk about how to use Instagram hashtags for maximum effect.

Structure of An Effective Instagram Hashtags Recipe

As you may know, there are countless hashtags you can use to define your brand and connect with your target audience on Instagram. Finding the right hashtags takes some time and research. But with a good strategy, you can get real conversions through Instagram.

Instagram lets you include up to 30 hashtags per post. A search of any Instagram hashtag will show you how many posts are associated with that hashtag.

For a good hashtag strategy, you will need to combine hashtags from four categories.

The correct combination of these hashtag types will maximize your post performance and help you reach your target audience. With this formula, you can easily identify 15-20 hashtags for each of your posts:

• Select 5-7 extremely popular hashtags. Extremely popular hashtags are those that have anywhere from about 100,000 to 500,000 posts associated with them. I don’t recommend using hashtags with more than 500,000 or so results because those super-popular hashtags invite bot activity and content is buried in those archives within seconds of being posted.
• Identify 5-7 moderately popular hashtags. Moderately popular hashtags likely have 10,000 to 100,000 posts associated with them.
• Choose 3-5 niche-specific hashtags. These hashtags likely have fewer than 10,000 posts associated with them and are hyper-targeted to your core business and the things your target audience is searching for.
• Include 1-3 branded hashtags. These are the hashtags you use exclusively for your brand. They may be brand-specific and campaign-related.

The reason for this specific recipe of hashtags is related to how hashtags are sorted by the algorithm in each hashtag hub. Instagram reviews each of the content for performance looking at the engagement it generates from your followers and non-followers.

When you use popular hashtags, your content will appear in searches shorter. This will generate an immediate burst of activity on your post. When you include moderately popular hashtags, it will keep your content active in those search results for hours, telling Instagram that your content has a long lifespan.

And the niche-specific hashtags are where you get to stand out. Because your followers are interacting with your post and the other hashtags are keeping your content spiking with activity, there’s a good chance your post will appear as a top post in the searches for the niche-specific hashtags you chose.

If people like your other content or profile, the chances are high that they’ll follow you. If the product or service you offer is what they’re looking for, you can even close a sale from that one post.

Hashtag Each Post On Instagram For Maximum Visibility

Now that we talked about a recipe for a good hashtag strategy, you need to determine the best hashtags for your brand. All of the hashtags you use on your Instagram posts should directly relate to the content itself, as well as your industry or brand:

• Industry hashtags may not be directly related to what’s in the post but are specific to the industry and clients you serve.
• Content hashtags should directly relate to the items in the post itself.
• Branded hashtags are hashtags that you and your customers use to showcase and tag your content on Instagram.

For your brand, you want to create a list of hashtags to satisfy these various categories.

Content hashtags may vary depending on the items or locations included in the post. Your industry hashtags, niche hashtags, and branded hashtags should be relatively consistent for all of your content. Industry hashtags will be more broadly focused on your industry as a whole, whereas your niche hashtags dig deep into the very targeted solution you offer.

And if you have difficulty with more hashtags, you can look at related hashtags in the Instagram search results. When you search for any specific hashtag, a sub-list recommends other related hashtags that you can research even more. Also, you can look for hashtag inspiration from other brands in your industry. See which hashtags other people or brands use on their content and determine if any of those are good for your brand.

What do you think? Will you try this Instagram hashtag formula yourself?