A lot of people neglect hashtags on Instagram, they either don’t know how to use them for their business or they just think they don’t work.
Hashtags are the secret sauce to success and are a powerful way to grow your audience!

The use of hashtags was first proposed by Chris Messina, a social technology expert, on Twitter on August 23, 2007, to differentiate between groups of topics within tweets.

Why are hashtags important?

Instagram has very limited search capabilities as a platform, one of the best and easiest ways to get found and to get a higher reach on your content is to use hashtags which will allow you to show up in various searches for your target audience and get more people finding your content.

Where to use hashtags

There are two specific places to use hashtags to appear and get found in search: Instagram feed posts and story posts. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags to be used on a post and can be put in the caption or the comments section for them to rank in search. On Instagram stories, you can only use up to 10 hashtags.

How do hashtags work?

Hashtags are where you rank, and content is how you rank.

A post ranks on hashtags by having the best content on that hashtag. The best content on a hashtag is determined by the engagement and interactions of that post – you will rank higher with the more likes, saves, comments and shares the post gets. The size of the hashtag can determine the competition and how hard it is going to be to rank on.

The higher the competition is on a specific hashtag the harder it is going to be to rank on it. The bigger the hashtag, the more people there are going for those top spots and the more engaging your content needs to be to perform better. For smaller accounts starting up, it is better to use smaller less competitive hashtags.

Reach a wider audience with hashtags

Using hashtags for Instagram makes your content more discoverable; by incorporating a hashtag strategy in your overall social media strategy you can reach your target audience easier. We use hashtags in our marketing strategy for our clients, we research them and find the most suitable hashtags to grow their online presence. By using relevant hashtags for clients we have reached 2,897 users on a post we may not have found without hashtags!