Ready to find the right hashtags for your business on Instagram? Ones that attract ideal followers and clients? Listen up!
Hi Friends, I’m Nicole and I spent years as an Instagram account manager hating the endless rabbit hole of hashtag searching.
Sourcing, testing, formatting, and then repeating the whole process over and over again for each piece of content.
In the end, it only left me question whether or not my efforts were actually working.
Putting ‘sets’ of hashtags together and then storing them in my planning app for reuse.
Those ‘sets’ were then perpetually re-used over and over again, only to find that my reach & impressions began to gradually decrease over time.
Maybe, just maybe, you said ‘FTW’ and copied a set of hashtags from your arch-nemesis, just to see if your content would produce the same engagement results as theirs. Look, we’ve all been there.
Is any of this sounding familiar yet?
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The thing is finding the right hashtags for your business on Instagram is not a “one and done” process because hashtags are constantly growing, evolving, changing, and even dying.
That’s exactly why those preformatted sets of tags in planning apps seemingly stop working over time, and that’s why finding the right hashtags for your business on Instagram feels like a never-ending egg hunt with no hollow chocolate bunny prize at the end.
Over the years, I learned to pick up on the key factors needed to make an individual hashtag successful in boosting a business’s visibility on Instagram.
I used those key factors to develop my own proven method which allowed me to easily source & format hashtags for any business.
Bazinga, I was on to something!
There went all the hashtags frustration and here came up-leveled reach and not dreading posting because I knew I had to go on a hashtag hung.
So what is the big secret to find the right hashtags for your business on Instagram?
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Here is an exercise to help you find the right hashtags for your business on Instagram!
Starting from absolute scratch? Or maybe your business is just in desperate need of a hashtag refresh; I want you to think of the most literal description of your business, one that covers exactly what you do!
If you are a website designer who works exclusively with WordPress, your description would be #wordpressdesigner.
Are you a wedding photographer based in Miami? Your descriptive hashtag would be #miamiweddingphotographer.
Come up with 5 descriptive hashtags before you even open up Instagram!
Once you have your 5 tags listed, open up Instagram!
Click over to the magnifier under the ‘tags’ option and begin typing out your first hashtag! Do not type out the whole tag, leave off the last 3-4 letters.
As you being typing out your first hashtag; you’ll notice suggested hashtags begin to populate in the search results underneath.
The order in which the hashtags will begin to populate results will be:
- The tag you’ve just typed in
- The next most popular tag that relates to your tag,
- The second step will repeat for each tag listed above it in the search
Typically the hashtag with the highest volume of uses and most popular uses will be right at the very top!
The key points you want to look for here are:
- The total volume of uses {if the tag has over 1-2 million uses, it’s a no go!}
- Which hashtags populate under your chosen hashtag, are they also applicable to your business? Put them on your list!
After you’ve gathered the information from the above two bullets, finish typing out the rest of your descriptor hashtag as you had intended.
Once the content for your descriptor hashtag has populated ‘top’ and ‘most recent posts’, you want to investigate a bit more!
What type of content lies under the ‘top’ section for this tag? Is it in line with the ‘top dogs’ of your niche?
Now click over to the most recent posts under this hashtag!
What type of content is residing under most recent posts?
Does it look like a sea of folx offering somewhat similar products or services (even if their branding is completely different than yours)?
Getting a quick overview of the content that is being produced under your descriptor hashtag will tell you if you are ‘in the right place’.
Some descriptor tags will be littered with businesses already operating from your niche.
Other tags will be a disjointed sea of mish-mash content.
The disjointed tags will look like a spam bomb just exploded all over the screen of your phone (don’t worry, you’ll know it when you see it!)
Repeat this exact process for the remaining four hashtags that you wrote down from the beginning of the exercise.
You can also repeat this exercise for any hashtags that you’ve discovered from the suggested list.
