Hashtags on Instagram in 2019 are very valuable tools for the organic growth of your profile. By now, everyone uses them, but not everyone knows what is the best way to do it in order to get into the Popular Page, which is the page where Instagram automatically puts all the best posts of that particular hashtag. End up in this very important page is the best way to increase the impressions and visibility of our posts and our profile without having to invest a single euro.
What are hashtags on Instagram
Hashtag is a term used to indicate a label that organizes different content in a specific theme. It is used on some web services and social networks, such as Instagram in fact, and has the role of thematic aggregator, giving users the opportunity to simplify the search for posts on certain topics or specific content. With the word hashtag we also indicate the hashtag symbol # that is used precisely to identify this tool, placing it in front of a word or phrase.
The word can be composed of letters, digits and underscores, spaces and special characters cannot be included. Once a hashtag is created, its search will return all the posts that have been tagged with the same. Hashtag is a word that comes from English, in fact composed of the translation of the two terms eraser-label. It was first introduced on Twitter more than 11 years ago to tag keywords and draw users' attention to particular topics. The first creator was Chris Messina, a lawyer from San Francisco who first created a hashtag on August 23, 2007.
How to use hashtags on Instagram to gain visibility
The first thing to know, a myth to dispel, is that using the most popular and common hashtags, the ones that practically everyone uses, such as #picoftheday or even #love, #wellness, #follow4follow, #instagood and so on, is not functional at all. In this way you are competing with an infinite amount of photos and posts and then reach the top positions of the Popular Page is virtually impossible with these hashtags. The secret that perhaps not everyone knows is to learn to divide our hashtags into three categories: the large, the medium and the small ones. This is a strategy that can help you tremendously in growing your Instagram profile. You can use up to a maximum of 30 hashtags, so it's best to choose ten for each group.
Small hashtags are usually those that have a usage between 0 and 999,000 posts, medium ones between 1 and 5 million posts and finally the big ones range from 5 million posts and up. Another dispassionate advice is to base the choice of hashtags on the number of followers of your profile, with a simple formula: multiplying the number of followers x 100. This means that if your profile is followed by 2,000 users, then you'll have to do 2,000 x 100, you'll get 200,000 and then the small hashtags you should choose will be those used in about 200,000 posts, and so on. In this way the chances of appearing in the first places of the Popular Page increase, consequently also increases the visibility of your profile and possible new likes, followers, interactions.
For the medium hashtags instead it is always better to look at the profiles of competitors and get suggestions from them, for the big ones instead the game is simple, they are the most used. Remember, for hashtags always use the language used by people who are part of your target audience.
That said, it is important to know that hashtags on Instagram are one of the best ways to increase followers and audience on the profile. It is important to know how to use them in the right way in order to expose your brand to a wide and segmented audience and get the maximum conversion in terms of user involvement, the so-called engagement, and followers.
Every post, whether photos or videos, that is published on Instagram should always be accompanied by a description and the hashtags wisely chosen, which are very important to organize the content on Instagram. Another goal is to optimize the discovery of content by users and also the effectiveness of each post. Any user who chooses to follow a certain hashtag because they are interested in the topic, if you have used the right hashtag, they will find your content.
How to organize hashtags
In order to use hashtags in the most correct and functional way, you also need to organize them in an orderly manner. One of the easiest methods is to publish them all in a Notepad on your PC or in the Notes app on your smartphone. Otherwise, you can use sheets like those in Excel, so you can organize everything even more thoroughly. Then make a table by entering all the data that Instagram gives you as you type in each specific hashtag, this serves you to always have at hand any specific information and copy and paste the hashtags you need every time you publish a new post. Remember that the hashtags must be included in the first comment.
How to find the best hashtags for your Instagram profile
It is not easy for every owner of a profile, even a professional one, who wants to sell products on Instagram, or who simply wants to optimize it, to know which are the winning hashtags for their business and for each specific post they decide to publish. There are very popular hashtags, as we have already seen, composed of simple words, and others that are less popular, but sometimes have a higher engagement and a theme that is more in line with the profile of the people who fall into your target audience, the latter are in fact the most recommended.
But you need to understand how to find these types of hashtags for your posts, the most effective ones to insert. So the first thing to do is to analyze and be able to find the hashtags that your audience uses, but also the competitors, even better if we can capture the most used by the leaders of our industry. Once identified, it is also necessary to be able to understand how each hashtag is used, in order to be able to process and publish posts that are able to engage the largest number of interested users.
You want to know, in a nutshell, what steps to follow to achieve this result? Then first open Instagram and research your competitors. Take some time then to analyze the posts they publish, observe the hashtags they insert and enter some. In this way you can discover the most popular posts related to them and analyze, for example, if the specific hashtags you are observing are mainly linked to videos or photos, what purpose the posts that are published have and what kind of description they are accompanied by. Continue to monitor the reaction of users to certain posts and hashtags, start experimenting with them and analyze the trend.
Always remember that using hashtags is essential, as is knowing how to use them in the most correct way possible, in order to obtain important results, those that we all want for our Instagram profile. You have to know how to identify and publish hashtags with criterion, otherwise the risk is to get the opposite of the desired results. This happens when the use of this very useful tool is done in an unconscious manner.
Hashtag types to know
There are additional categories of hashtags very important depending on the result you want to achieve. In particular we see branded hashtags, those that are used precisely for brands, which are therefore unique to each business. Every business owner can create his own hashtag of which he will be the creator forever. Examples of brand-related hashtags could be your own name, to develop your personal brand, or that of your company. You can also decide that the hashtag has nothing to do with your name but must obviously be inherent to your business. If for example your company is creating a cab that can fly, then a hashtag could be #taxidelfuture, so that different themes could be connected to you and your company, and of course to your audience. The same hashtag could also be important to promote advertising campaigns.
The other category of hashtags that is important to mention is the one called Community Hashtag, which connects users to a certain topic, forming a community of people interested in that particular topic. It is a very effective way to connect users and improve the reach of posts, as well as having the great potential to intercept new followers. With this strategy the community that revolves around your profile can grow. The advice that I would give to find the best Community Hashtags is undoubtedly to analyze the profiles of your audience to see some that are already being used and get an idea of what users are looking for, the topics they are interested in.