Studies have shown social media posts that have more than one hashtag associated with them receive more engagement than posts that don’t include any hashtags at all. Using trending hashtags can help you reach your target audience more, attract more followers to your networks, and increase your overall engagement.
Simply including as many hashtags as possible, however, will not work. You have to ensure you have high-quality relevant trending hashtags in order to really maximise your engagement.
What Is A Hashtag And Why Are They So Important?
Let’s start with the basics. Hashtags are basically the sorting mechanism for any social network out there, like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. They will determine the social media reach of your content, and how discoverable that content is. They connect categories to your posts, which helps you to reach a wider audience. This is why hashtags are considered the most efficient tool if you are wanting to grow your social media network successfully.
Trending hashtags, in particular, are important for your social media networking in general because they connect you with the relevant audience for your content right now. When you use hashtags that are trending within your niche, you are giving your content a good chance of being seen by your target audience, and you are keeping up with what people are finding interesting right now. However, not all trending hashtags are good for your business or brand. Yes, they will encourage millions of potential viewers, but they need to be relevant to the right audience. If you want to find the most relevant users for your content, then you need to get specific with the hashtags that you use and try not to be too general.
With that in mind, instead of trying to just find the most popular hashtags out there, we recommend that you find trending hashtags that have an active community behind them, and are highly relevant to your target audience and industry. The best way to do this is to look at what hashtags your competitors are using, as well as your target users, and industry leaders. When you start researching, you might be surprised to discover the kind of hashtags that are being used by your rivals.
Here are some more expert tips on how to make the most of the tools at your disposal when curating your hashtag social media marking strategy:
Explore Page On Instagram
We know Instagram is one of the main platforms where using hashtags is essential. Therefore you need to be familiar with the Explore Page. This is a place where a collection of posts are generated by what you have previously liked and interacted with can be found. It's a great place to look at what hashtags are being used that will no doubt be relevant to your industry and followers. You can access the explore page on both the mobile and desktop forms of Instagram. Simply click on any posts that you feel are the most relevant and look at what hashtags are being used, and use them for your own posts!
“Follow” Favourite Hashtags
By following relevant hashtags you can keep checking top posts are that people are engaging with the most. This will inspire you to come up with other ideas for posts that you can affiliate these relevant hashtags to.
Less Can Be More
As we have already touched upon, it is way more important to use fewer, more relevant and effective hashtags within your posts, as opposed to chucking as many hashtags in you think may work “just in case”. It really is worth taking the time to figure out a sweet spot when it comes to the number of hashtags that you use. Instagram has a post limit of 30 hashtags, however, don’t just use this many every time. Think about only the most useful and beneficial ones and use those ones, however many that may be. Around 10 per post seems to be what some consider an ideal amount.
Use A Hashtag Generator
Sometimes it may seem like everyone has taken all the good hashtags, or maybe you just don't have the time or energy to come up with fresh, engaging hashtags. That's when using a hashtag generator can really yield results. We suggest Task Ant, which has the experience and expertise to get ahead of your competition. Task Ant has a search bar for hashtags that you will see on their homepage when you visit them for the first time. All you need to do is enter a keyword or hashtag that you use already, and they will suggest relevant tags. They even have data and analytics around their suggestions so that you can work out which ones are relevant to your content, and which ones aren’t worth your time.
Keep things fluid
It's important to say that you need to remember your hashtag strategy is a fluid thing. Just like any industry trend, it’s always changing. It’s important to keep up with what’s going on with social media networks like Twitter and Instagram.