Hashtags are the cherry on top of your business’ Social Media Marketing Strategy. They enhance your account’s reach so you can be more discoverable by your target audience. A post averages 12.6% more engagement in combination with at least one Instagram hashtag. Hashtags also enhance your business’ ability to build an online community. As a Social Media Marketing Agency, we’ve created this Instagram hashtag guide to help your small business.

What are Instagram hashtags?

Hashtags start with the ‘#’ symbol and contain letters, numbers, and even emojis, such as ‘#photooftheday📷’. Hashtags arrange your content into a category, making your small business’ posts easier to find and more discoverable.

Where should I post Instagram hashtags?

You can include up to ten hashtags on your Story and thirty hashtags on your Posts. You can place them in the original caption or post them in a separate comment below the post. Posting the hashtags in a comment often looks more professional unless you’re using a specific hashtag to create a community, group or trend.

What does my small business need to consider when using Instagram hashtags?

The Size of Hashtags

You can search for particular hashtags on the Explore page, under ‘Tags’ – here, you can find the number of posts associated with that hashtag and what the top and most recent posts are. Hashtags with millions of posts are unlikely to work well for your small business; your post will submerge in a sea of millions of other posts.

Instead, research your hashtag first. Find hashtags that have a smaller number of posts, which are more niche and suit your industry.

Repetition of Hashtags

You may think you’re saving time by copying and pasting the same list of hashtags for every post, but this will damage the effectiveness of your engagement and lower your place in the algorithm.

Shadow Banned Hashtags

Some hashtags have been ‘Shadow Banned’, meaning Instagram has banned the hashtag due to inappropriate content/breaking of the community guidelines. It doesn’t mean that you can’t use it, but you will only see some top posts. Banned Instagram hashtags include

#beautyblogger, #snapchat, #hardworkpaysoff, #boho and #workflow. Check out the full list here.

If your small business uses banned hashtags, then your engagement will likely fall, and Instagram may make your other hashtags more redundant to lower your place in the algorithm.

What Instagram hashtags should my small business use?

You need to think about:

• What will my target audience be searching for? What are they currently using?
• Is it relatable to my business offering and ideals?
• What are my competitors using?
• What hashtags are my competitors and target audience following?

When your small business uses a great strategy, for example, a combination of Instagram Ads, hashtags and great content, you are guaranteed to reach your ideal clients.

As a Digital and Social Media Marketing Agency, we’re always up-to-date with the latest trends and strategies. You can focus on your business’ offering whilst we research and create effective strategies for your business.

At Big Voice, we are experts in all things social and can create a bespoke service to suit your small business. Contact us today for a no-obligation chat.

We are a small digital agency that is dedicated to helping businesses of any size grow their presence on social media through strategic and cost effective marketing. Quite simply we fully manage your social media marketing including content creation and curation, posting and optimisation so you don’t have to and we guarantee you social growth.