Hashtag Tips and Tricks
The Best Ways to Use Hashtags on Social Media
Hashtags are still one of the most popular methods to grow your audience on various social media platforms – ESPECIALLY Instagram. According to research cited on Inc’s website, posts with up to two hashtags get double the engagement of ones that don’t have any.
The thing about hashtags, is that they are both a science and an art. You can’t just blow up your post with 20 hashtags and expect magic to happen. Believe it or not, there’s a strategy behind finding the right hashtags to use and exactly where to use them. Below we cover some helpful resources and tips for finding the ideal hashtags for your post and making sure they perform.
Twitter may seem old school, but it’s still super popular, relevant and not to mention, a hashtag paradise. In Twitter’s sidebar, you’ll see a trending box that alerts people of the top hashtags (both overall and within their network). Tweeting hashtags was best practice from the get-go, and continues to be a mainstay today.
But this doesn’t mean you want to load your tweet full of them. You only need one or two as a rule of thumb. It’s more of a quality vs. quantity thing, and the right hashtags will help your tweets get more overall engagement (clicks, likes, replies, etc.). Tweets with hashtags are also 58% more likely to get retweeted. This type of increase in engagement can help Twitter accounts get more followers AND a wider audience.
To find out which hashtags are most popular in a specific industry, try using the tool Hashtagify. If you enter in a high-level hashtag, it suggests other related hashtags to include and shows them based on popularity or correlation:
This tool is a great way to find related hashtags for your tweet.
Yes – the Gram is driven by hashtags. Here, you can throw in a little more sizzle and up the number of hashtags used, but moderation is still key. Instagram currently allows up to 30 hashtags per post (including comments and captions combined) – but once again, it’s important to hashtag strategically and relevantly. The best part about hashtags on Insta is that it’s a huge booster for gaining organic followers and widenening your audience.
While you can certainly use Hashtagify for Instagram data, the app Hashtagger is where it’s at. Enter in a top-level keyword, and it will display the top related keywords with a percentage correlation of how often they are used with the main keyword. You can then copy up to 30 and past them into your Instagram post.
It’s common for users to put their hashtags in comments opposed to the caption, because it gives your post a cleaner look. However, Instagram’s algorithm is only getting smarter, and it looks for these comment hashtags to find spammers (via shadowbanning). Even though you want to incorporate popular hashtags in your post to get more impressions, keep relation and relevacy in mind and be sure to mix it up – don’t use the exact same group of hashtags on every single post.
Overall Hashtag Tips
Twitter and Instagram should be where all your hashtag efforts are. Even though LinkedIn and Facebook accept hashtags, they haven’t caught on as much as the other two platforms. So it’s not worth the effort to include them on LinkedIn and Facebook posts.
When you are tweeting or posting on Instagram, cut down on clutter by making existing words in the tweet into hashtags, instead of repeating the word as a hashtag at the end.
Hashtags continue to be an effective way to grow engagement on Twitter and Instagram. Make sure hashtags are an included part of your posting strategy to get more followers and better conversations.