How To Find The Right Hashtags For Your Social Media Marketing Posts

Learn how you can increase engagement on your social media content through strategic use of hashtags

Think of hashtags as keywords on Google. When you add a hashtag to a post on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, that post will then be searchable by anyone who looks up that same hashtag through the search bar on the platform.

Hashtags are a great way to expand the reach of your social media posts, especially when used properly. And the problem is, they often aren’t. 

Why Use Hashtags On Social Media? 

At any given time there are countless different hashtags that are trending, depending on what’s happening in entertainment, politics, meme culture, etc. When you are creating content and posting it on social media, hashtags allow people to discover your content even if they don’t follow you. It can also help you to categorize various types of content that you publish so that they can be grouped together by topic.

There are three main styles of hashtag usage, exclusive/personal use, campaign use, and to find the hashtags that are trending the most. Personal use might be using a very exclusive hashtag to categorize images that you post of your child or pet so that when you search the hashtag, it will only show those particular types of photos that you posted over the years in one feed. For this use, you will want to find a hashtag that wouldn't be used by anyone else and is very specific to you and the photo you are posting.

Trending hashtag usage could look something like putting #yummy when posting about your new favorite song by Justin Bieber. When you add that hashtag, anyone else who is interested in that song by Justin Bieber will possibly see your post and want to give you a like, comment, or even follow.

Many companies will use a specific hashtag to promote their campaign, just like Nike has in their social media campaigns. The hashtag #justdoit has been used nearly 19 million times. How is that for hashtag success? 

How Many Hashtags Can You Use?

Instagram allows a maximum hashtag usage of 30 per post. Hashtags should be maximized whenever possible and if you are trying to rapidly grow an account on Instagram then you should try to use 30 hashtags every time you post.

Other platforms like Facebook or Linkedin do not have the same hashtag limitations, however, hashtag engagement on those platforms are utilized much less and therefore shouldn’t be overdone. I recommend using no more than five hashtags per post on Facebook and Linkedin, while ensuring that the hashtags I choose are strategic and applicable to the content of the post.

How Do You Find The Best Trending Hashtags?

Finding the optimal hashtags for what you are posting about is an important element in growing your fan base, and driving engagement on your posts. There are many tools that can be used to discover what hashtags are currently trending so you can stay effective in your hashtag strategy.

One of these great tools is called All-Hashtag.com which tracks the top trending hashtags for the day, week, month, and all time. Along with that, you can also search a specific hashtag and it will produce multiple options for different hashtags that are similar to what you searched for.

How To Refine Your Hashtag Strategy:

Check for how often hashtags are used, and try to get specific hashtags that apply to your niche. You can easily type in a hashtag in the search bar of your instagram and see how many times it’s been used. If a hashtag has been used millions of times, it may not be a good choice to use since it’s so broad. Try to search for hashtags that have good usage in the thousands, and that is specific to your niche or post content.

Finding hashtags that are niche specific, and not overused, will help you to gain new interested followers who truly resonate with you. For example, don’t use #artist, try using #oilpainter, or #charcoalart instead. 

What’s The Best Way To Use Hashtags?

There are two places you can put your hashtags in an Instagram post -- in the post copy section, or in the first comment of your post.

If you are creating a post that includes a significant amount of copy, it can be good to sprinkle in some of your hashtags throughout the copy so that some of the words of your sentence are replaced with the applicable hashtag.

If the post is shorter with less body copy, then I recommend placing your hashtags in the first comment section instead of the copy section. This just keeps your posts cleaner and doesn’t make the post look desperate for engagement as when they are all in the post copy.

How To Avoid “Spammy” Hashtags

Hashtags not only attract new interested followers, but can also attract hordes of spam accounts that are automated by bots to engage with posts that use top hashtags. Some of the top hashtags for attracting “spammy” followers include #followme, #love, #instagood, #happy, etc.

These super generic hashtags should be avoided, unless you want to attract a lot of fake automated ghost account followers.

The best approach is to find hashtags that are genuine to your brand. The more you post, the more you can evaluate if that hashtag is assisting with follower growth. If it is, you are on the right path.