Hashtag Research

Image Shot & Styled by Shout & Co. for Studio Milk

Do you have a hashtag strategy in place for your business’ digital presence?  

If you haven't given much thought to it previously, perhaps it's time to start…

Hashtags are hugely beneficial, especially when it comes to helping potential new followers find you: the hashtag term will be what users input into the Instagram search bar to follow a topic that interests them (and thus find your related pin or post).  Think of hashtags as the Google search term equivalent for Instagram.

If you're not using hashtags to categorise your posts effectively, users simply won't find you in amongst the millions of other posts that are being published every day.

In short, hashtags help boost your post's visibility on social media.

Research has shown that reach rate increases by 11% as the number of hashtags increase from one to 30. Historically, hashtags on Facebook were redundant, but as the platform has evolved, so has the usefulness of its hashtags.

If finding suitable hashtags has been a spray-and-pray type of strategy, here are some easy ways to research hashtags that your ideal audience will respond to:

• Use Google’s keyword planner: it’s a great tool to help you find keywords that audiences are using to find product / service offerings that are similar to yours. If you have a Google Ads account, this planner is already available to you

• Type in a word into Google’s search bar and it will autofill with some suggestions - these will give you some insights into what people are searching for

• Use Instagram’s search bar: type in a keyword and it will you variations on that keyword. For example, if you search for the term #dog, it will also offer up "#dogsofinstagram, #doglover, and about a bajillion other hashtags. These alternatives might prove useful - or perhaps even better selections that your original keyword search

• Consider what your competitors are using: have a look at their hashtags and see if any are a great fit for your business

• Look at your SEO: the keywords you’ve built into the backend of your website make great hashtags too because they use a similar customer psychology

• Poll your audience or customers: ask them to tell you what types of keywords they’ve used to find you or would use to find a business like yours

• Use online tools: Semrush and Wordstream are just a couple of resources that you could tap into for keyword generation

• Look at what’s trending: during lockdown, #supportsmallbusiness became a trending hashtag, so was a great one to add to the hashtag mix. #NZMade and #MadeinNZ tie in with the growing loyalty towards locally made products so are great options too.

Image Shot & Styled by Shout & Co. for Prezzy Card

Keep these notes in mind when generating your list of hashtags:

• Use words that your audience uses to describe your products or services, not words that you want them to use (or think they should be using): it’s about using terms that they use

• Consider the plural or singular versions of your keywords: e.g. if you’re using the keyword “recipe”, you might find that “recipes” is a better term to use because it is less competitive (and thus won’t get buried as quickly by other subsequent posts that also use this hashtag)

Now that you have your list of hashtags, here’s how to use them effectively:

• Mix up your hashtags so that you’re not using the same ones for each post: we have specific hashtags saved when we’re posting about product photography, and they’re different to the hashtags we have saved for videos, design-focused posts, food photography posts and so on

• If you post to Instagram on the fly (rather than batch creating your content ahead of time), have your hashtags saved to your phone’s notepad app so that you can copy and paste them into your captions accordingly without having to type them out every time

• This same method applies even if you do batch create your content ahead of time, simply add your hashtags to your scheduled posts by copying and pasting them from your notepad app

• Group your hashtags at the end of the caption: we like to have our caption separated out from the hashtags by using dots down the screen, like this:

  *caption*

  .

  .

  .

  #hashtags #go #here

• Use hashtags that have between 10k and 10m posts against them. Use too many popular hashtags (i.e. millions of posts use that hashtag) and your post will get lost in amongst them all. Use hashtags that are too niche (i.e. a handful of posts use them), because no one’s using them, no one will see your post

• Only use hashtags relevant to that post: if your post is about #horses, there’s no point using the hashtag #goats

• Use hashtags in your stories too

• Set aside time every few months to update your hashtags: as the market shifts, so will user search and purchasing behaviours: your hashtags need to keep up accordingly

• Test your hashtags: add new ones in, see how it affects your reach

• If you operate within a specific geographic region, e.g. New Zealand, find the NZ-specific versions of your key hashtags. For example, if #beer is a hashtag that’s relevant to your business, consider using #NZbeer too

Needing some help setting up your hashtags?

Book your FREE 30min Discovery Call to find out how we can help you!