Hashtags are important for engagement and helping people to find and follow your account. Here are some tips for choosing the best hashtags for Instagram.
I had such an overwhelmingly positive response to my last Instagram Hacks post on how to ‘schedule’ posts on Instagram that I thought I’d share how I choose the best hashtags for Instagram. Hashtag awesome, right? 🙂
You want to choose hashtags that increase your Instagram engagement. By engagement, I mean more people finding your account that don’t already follow you and more likes. With the new Instagram smartfeed rolling out right now, engagement is more important than ever. If people don’t ‘like’ your photo, it will get low priority assigned to it and decrease the chance people will even see it!
When I first changed from using Instagram as a personal social channel to using it as a way to connect with followers and increase my influence, I used the hashtags that were most popular. Think #love, #photooftheday, #instacool, #style, etc.
Because these hashtags are super popular, they are also full of garbage. Hundreds of photos are added to the hashtag by the minute and most of them are spam, like ads to buy more Instagram followers, bad selfies, fake celebrity accounts and just plain ugly sh*t (excuse my French). The hashtag #tagsforlikes has 249 million photos. By using this hashtag, you are literally just contributing to the noise. When you share your photo, it will instantly be so far down in the hashtag feed that no one will see it.
Instead, it’s important to choose hashtags that align with your niche. You want your photo to show up in a stream that is mainly ‘real’ photos and something that people (not bots!) want to scroll through and engage with.
A great first step is finding the hashtags that brands and big blogs have created to engage their audience. The blog A Beautiful Mess does an amazing job with this. All of their hashtag start with #abm.
Using hashtags created by brands is also makes it more likely that a brand will ‘regram’ you. Take #GapLove for example. Can you imagine if Gap shared your photo to its 1.2 million users!? Even if they don’t list it in their profile, look at their photo captions and see if you can find a brand-specific hashtag.
Also check out the hashtags that big accounts with great engagement are using to connect with and gain followers. Find these users by searching for a hashtag with a beautiful feed and clicking on one of the ‘top posts’. See what other hashtags that user has also used.
If you are traveling, find some popular local Instagrammers and see what hashtags they are using to promote their posts. A good way to do this is to search a local landmark and see what the top posts are.
For recipes or food, try hashtags from large accounts that share recipes, like #dailyfoodfeed, #feedfeed, #foodgawker, #tryitordiet, etc. These hashtags have the benefit of the possible of regrams and highly-engaged (and hungry!) people scrolling through the feed.
Worried about hashtags cluttering your photos? I put them in as a comment below the main caption and as soon as two other people leave comments, they’ll be hidden unless someone opens the post. I’ve also see other people put the comments at the end of the caption. As long as the caption is three lines long, the comments will be hidden in the main feed.
That’s it! Any questions or thoughts? Anything that I missed that you find helpful in choosing hashtags? Let me know in the comments below.
P.S. Like this post? Then you’ll love my post on how to schedule Instagram posts!
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Great tips, Kelly! I love the idea of looking up local sites for the top posts and finding out what those users hashtagged. Thanks for sharing! 🙂 Keep up the good IG game.
Awesome! Glad you found the post helpful!
Omg YES you’re the one who told me about the airplane mode (read it on your blog). I do it ALL the time now, it’s freakin’ brilliant.
I just got a new phone a few days ago and I’m such a dink when it comes to everything. A completely different platform than what I’m used to (old: BlackBerry, new: Nexus/Android).
Thanks for the tips! I knew that we should put our hashtags in the comment section, but it never worked on my ‘berry for some reason (weird). I’m going to try and see if it works on the android later.
Yesss! So glad my tip helped you streamline your workflow. Hopefully the hashtags will work better on your new phone!
Awesome, awesome, awesome post. I knew of the changes coming to Instagram (with very mixed feelings about it), but that makes hashtags as important as ever. I find myself falling victim to the tags like #love or #instagood as well, but you’re right, it just oversaturates and already noisy tag. I like the idea of tagging brands, and big blogs. Def bookmarking this to come back to! xx
Thanks Shannon! Glad this helped!
great tips! i’ve been looking at making small changes for the most impact, and i think hashtags are a great way to go about it. 🙂
Yes! This is definitely something that won’t take much extra effort once you have the hashtags picked out!
Great ideas!! I’m always trying to do more, better on IG and can use all the help I can get. Thanks for passing along your expertise!
Thanks! Happy to share a few things that have worked for me especially since Instagram just got much more complicated with the new feed!
I love instagram but must admit I get a little bit lost with the hashtags. Will definitely check out how to schedule posts though I didn’t realize you could!
Awesome! I promise my easy ‘scheduling’ post will make your life so much easier!
This is a great post.I just read the scheduling one too and love that idea. I will start taking your advice on searching out good hashtags. I have tried many times to put hashtags in my first comment though, both on my iPhone and my laptop, and I always get a little red exclamation mark show up and they don’t post. I’ve tried changing the quantity from a lot to just a couple and using different ones and it never works. Any ideas?
Hey Mel – Sorry for the late reply! Somehow your comment ended up in my spam folder! I’ve also had the red exclamation post show up and from what I can tell it’s because you have too many hashtags. Usually I just delete a couple and then it works, although it sounds like you already tried that. Another thing I tried when that didn’t work is rearranging or deleting a few hashtags from the middle. It might be that Instagram thinks you are a spammer trying to post the same comment twice and this is enough to bypass that. I hope that helps!
This is so useful Kelly, THANK YOU!!! I am a hashtag dummy!
No problem Nagi! I’m so glad this helped!
such great tips, I figured out a while back that using popular hashtags was useless especially since instagram nowadays only shoes most recent photos in “the explore” tab. and i have had a lot of engagement using brand or top account
s hashtags, most times they will also like your photo if you share at the right time (like right when they share a photo), and this is good, because then your photo will appear in their followers pools.
Thanks for the tips, i will start finding those hashtags as you’ve suggested (didn’t think to check through their photos)
No prob! Happy this helped you up your game even more!
This is perfection Kelly!!! I always struggle with all the hash tagging! i know you are an insta queen so this is just fantastic!
Hooray! Happy this helped! 🙂