Making the Most of Your Hashtags
Sure, we all know what hashtags are, but why and how should we use them?
Why Should you use hashtags in your posts?
It’s more discoverable
By utilizing hashtags, you’re making your content discoverable to people who don’t already follow your brand.
If you were to not use any hashtags at all in your post, you’d only have the potential of reaching your followers.
When you use hashtags, you increase the audience that will see your posts, therefore, making it more likely to grow your brand online.
It puts your content in front of the right people
People interact with the posts they like to see. If you’re using hashtags, you’re able to put your content in front of the right people.
When you put your content in front of the right people, you’re likely to build your audience of people who are interested in your product or service.
Bigger audience = More potential to monetize your social media.
What hashtags should I use?
This really comes down to your business, but here is how I categorize my hashtags:
Location Hashtags
These put your content in front of local people if you have a brick and mortar location. You’ll probably have 3-5 hashtags in this group.
Service Hashtags
With these, you’ll highlight what you do and what services you offer. These could also be product hashtags that put your products in front of interested people. These will be 5-10 of your hashtags.
Niche/Industry Hashtags
With these hashtags you’ll highlight the industry or niche your business is in. These will be your reach increasing hashtags, and will get your posts a lot more exposure. These will make up 5-15 of your hashtags depending on how many are relevant in that particular post.
“How do I know what hashtags to use?”
Easy. Find a competitor that has a great instagram presence and has great reach and engagement, and start to use those hashtags.
If your product or service is superior to theirs, having your posts alongside theirs will start to drive traffic to your page instead of theirs.
When you have more traffic, you increase your sales.
“Should I use the same hashtags everytime I post?”
No… Please don’t.
Plenty of people have tested this out on Instagram to find that post that use the same group of hashtags get less and less reach over time.
Change up your hashtags on your posts and test which hashtags work best for your business.
A Free Tip:
When posting your hashtags, don’t include them in your caption. Instead, put them in the first comment of your post to keep the caption clean looking.
Not only does it make the caption cleaner, it is rumored to help your position in the feed of your followers because the post has already had an interaction on it.