To be successful on Instagram you need to choose the right hashtags: here's a guide that will make you popular on the social network
Hashtags are a very important tool on Instagram: by choosing the right ones your posts can get many more views and, as a result, your profile can gain many more followers. But, at the same time, if you use hashtags too aggressively your posts won't get views. So how do you choose the best hashtags for posts on Instagram?
Let's start with the basic rules: you can't use more than 30 hashtags in one post. Then you must only use hashtags relevant to your post, or the post risks being filtered as spam. Finally, it's good to use hashtags that have the right popularity: neither too much nor too little. If you use the hashtag #gaming, for example, your posts will get lost in the sea of 29 million other posts tagged in the same way. If you use #videogiochianni90, which has just 77 posts, you'll be targeting a niche.
Three thresholds for your hashtags
A good way to choose the right hashtags is to use 8 that have at most 100 thousand posts, 8 that have up to 500 posts, and 8 that have up to 5 million posts. This way you'll spread your content across three audience "brackets" and you'll still have 6 finishing touches available.
How to find effective hashtags on Instagram
At this point the question arises: where do I find hashtags for each of the three thresholds? The easiest method is to pick a very generic and highly populated one and search through the related words. You can do this yourself manually, by going to look at the hashtags used in the most popular posts, or by using one of the many tools you can find online. At this point divide the related hashtags by the number of posts and choose your 8 favorites for each threshold. When you have made your list, copy and paste it into a post so that you always have it available.
How to make hashtags effective
We were saying that there is also the risk that our posts will not be shown among those with the hashtags we have chosen. This happens if we use the same hashtags too often, so it is good to use the 6 remaining hashtags by choosing some that are closely related to the topic of our photo or video. If we post recipes and photos of desserts, for example, for a chocolate cake we will certainly use both #chocolate cake (about 9,300 posts) and #double-chocolate cake (from just 38 posts). This way, Instagram will understand that we don't want to "appear at all costs" but that, indeed, what we are posting is a wonderful chocolate cake that everyone should see.