How to perfect your hashtags

What is a Hashtag?

Hash-tag - A word or phrase preceded by the # sign. It was launched on Twitter but now is used across social media.

It is essentially an index for your content, as it identifies a specific topic. It connects your content to a subject, when you add them to your post, you are adding to an index. This means that people can find you without following you.

However, hashtags often confuse people, some people don’t know when to use them so don’t use them at all. My view, why wouldn’t you? If you reach a few more people by using a hashtag, then it is worth it!

So how do you know which hashtags to use?

They need to be industry specific, post specific and what is important to your customer.

You need to do some research, look at what hashtag’s others are using, look at accounts similar to yours, those that are in your niche and see where you would like your posts indexed.

Hashtag size

The Hashtag size is the number of times a tag has been used on Instagram and the size does matter.

By using hashtags that are too general will mean you are lost in a sea of content, too small and no one will find you. So, what is the answer? Have a mix!

An ideal hashtag list (the 20-30 hashtags you are using on a post) might look something like this:

• 5-10 hashtags 1k-10k uses

• 1-5 hashtags 10k-100k uses

• 1-5 hashtags 100k-500k uses

But always make sure you use them; they can’t do any harm!