You’ve probably found our blog looking for crucial answers to your burning questions – and also, because you’re using hashtags, you’re trying to conduct strategic research, but you aren’t quite sure if you’re doing it the right way? Or maybe you aren’t sure about the effectiveness of hashtags at all?! Well, to begin with, let us say: you’re in the right place and on the right track!
Hashtags can make or break your Instagram content marketing strategy.
They are SO high-powered that using the RIGHT, well-tailored ones can make a massive difference in the amount of engagement your posts receive, as well as in the number of potential followers (and future clients!) visiting your profile.
Hashtags are meant to filter relevant content for Gram’s users. In a nutshell: yup, they make your posts discoverable. They help people who might be looking for the things you post, come across your profile, and hear what you have to say. According to a research by Hubspot, content with at least ONE HASHTAG generates an average of 12.5% more engagement than those with no tags!
However, choosing the most effective ones isn’t a piece of cake, and it demands an authentically strategic approach. Use the wrong, too random ones, and you won’t get any precious visibility, you’ll receive plenty of spam comments, and you won’t really reach anybody new from your target audience.
So how to find winning ones? How to pick hashtags that will actually work in your favour? Today we’ll discuss the highly practical side of this challenge!
Here comes the time for a confession: what has given us extra motivation to prepare this article for you is the simple fact that lately, we’ve learned that there is still too much confusion out there when it comes to hashtag research. Today, we will be discussing common hashtag research mistakes that could be intensively hindering the growth and visibility of your profile + we’re exposing our secret weapon when it comes to finding the perfect, most beneficial search volume for your hashtags!
Want to learn how to find hashtags that are well-tailored to your profile? Let’s dive in!
What’s in it for you? Today you’ll learn:
- Why is it so important to use the right hashtags, pay attention to their search volume, and not just “save time” by picking random ones?
- What the search volume of hashtags really is (in theory and practice)?!
- Which hashtags should you use to attract more potential followers to enjoy your content?
- What’s the most strategic solution: using viral hashtags or maybe the ones with the small competition?
- How to determine which hashtags work most effectively for your profile?
What does “search volume” mean in practice?
Using popular, commonly used hashtags increases your visibility and brings more potential followers, right?
Uh, uh. No.
Not exactly. We’re here to debunk this highly harmful myth!
There are some wildly generic hashtags like #girl, #love, #like, #like4like that have been used over 100 million times. Are they good choices when you’re trying to attract more engaged followers and boost the visibility of your posts? The answer isn’t even complicated, as you might have guessed.
When you use these viral hashtags, you aren’t making a smart move: actually, you’re hindering your growth and giving up on chances for better visibility. Users worldwide are using these hashtags non-stop, and their explore pages are updating and changing all the time. It’s happening at the speed of LIGHT.
Want to check it for yourself?
Type in the hashtag #summer and pick ONE POST that you’re going to focus on. Come back in 5-10 minutes, and check how unbelievably long you have to scroll down the feed to find it once again. You often won’t be able to do it because it’s literally lost in the sea of spammy content.
For example, if you have a photo of yourself enjoying sunbathing or smiling happily with all your teeth standing on the beautiful greek beach, instead of using the hashtag #summer, you should opt for something with less volume, such as #greekholidays. A hashtag like #greekholidays is more narrowed down and less likely to get lost in the sea of summer-related hashtags from all around the world.
Within Instagram’s search bar, you can always check the search results for a given hashtag. The hashtags #summer, #summervibes, and #summertime have MILLIONS of post search results. Your content would not have a chance of being found.
The key takeaway? The larger the hashtag’s search volume is, the more search engine results are out there (= the higher the number of posts under a particular hashtag). Those results can be startling random, and by using these most generic hashtags, you will mostly attract accidental, arbitrary visitors who aren’t activ looking for what you have to say and show off. It’s the tactic we’d recommend avoiding!
Let’s elaborate on that a bit: so what exactly makes them such poor choices?
- When you use an ultra-popular hashtag, your post gets lost in the sea of new content within SECONDS, at the speed of light.
- When you add this hashtag to your post, it may be visible in the explore section a split second but is almost instantly buried by plenty of other posts that were added to the hashtag AT THE SAME TIME, actually.
- It’s doubtful anybody will see your post within this hashtag.
- Popular hashtags make sense only if you have a LARGE following and get quick engagement right after uploading new content.
We hope now you realize that these popular hashtags aren’t strategic and won’t bring you any meaningful traffic. They’re too random, too generic, and most valuable Instagram users from your target audience don’t use them!
Spammers and bots adore popular hashtags, the ones that have been used a bazillion times. It’s the easier way to find plenty of posts where they can spread the SPAM in the comment section.
What can you expect?
Instead of a million likes, you’ll get tons of comments you’ll spend ages deleting. This isn’t a very profitable strategy, as you can see.
The more specific the chosen hashtag is, the smaller number of search engine results we can see. Who is scrolling throughout the posts described with these more narrowed-down hashtags? Mostly those users who are genuinely interested in a particular domain!
And the competition there is much, MUCH lower.
So what’s our secret sauce tip? Yup. Choose low competition hashtags. There are so many opportunities waiting for you there. If you choose an overly popular hashtag, your post will get instantly lost, especially with the influx of bots and spammers targeting popular tags.
On the other hand, there are also some hashtags with too low search volume. They’re too specific, so nobody is looking for them.
Or maybe five people, but of course, that’s not enough to improve your stats, right?
We need to find a happy medium – the search volume that goes hand in hand with your profile’s size. So here we go…
What you’ll need? Some time to do the research and a bit of patience as well! But to begin with: congratulations, there’s no better and more strategic idea than to conduct a strategic idea to conduct in-depth research to track down new, practical, high-performing, relevant hashtags. They will help you reach your target audience!
Two primary rules: when you use viral hashtags, your posts get lost in the sea of random content, but when you use hashtags with too low search volume, almost nobody sees your posts, and you aren’t expanding your reach.
So how exactly can you figure out which hashtags are the smartest choices to get you closer to your goals?
There is one tool we find extremely helpful – IQ HASHTAGS – that will help you figure out the most relevant hashtags for your post. It isn’t free, but the prices are reasonable – they’re surprisingly low for the number of features the tool provides. Once you’re already logged in, head over to “Search hashtags” section, and type in one hashtag that describes best what the content you want to post is about. Then, you can determine the size of hashtags (search volume) that interest you and set (the maximum and the minimum) search volume (size) of hashtags you’d like to find.
How to determine the size of the most optimal hashtags matching your profile’s size?
- Head over to “Hashtag performance” feature, and analyze the charts to find out which hashtags have given your content the position in TOP9 most recently (pay attention to their sizes – this insight will tell you which size is the most optimal for your current level of profile’s growth)
- Try using different sizes of hashtags (for example: 10 hashtags with low volume search, 10 medium-size ones, and 10 most general, with high volume search) to strategically test out different methods of attracting new followers and expanding your reach, and also to check different solutions that may effectively work out for your account.
- Sure thing: you can skip this part, and research new hashtags without choosing any hashtag search volume – but we’d rather recommend doing it this way, more consciously to test different sizes and observe which ones are the most beneficial for your profile’s growth: this knowledge can become your secret weapon!
To wrap-up!
Good, effective hashtags don’t have to be vast and widespread; reversely, they rarely are.
If the hashtags you pick are too broad in scope, they’re being used by a significant number of other content creators, and as a result, your content can get instantly lost in the ocean of thousands of newly uploaded posts, and you won’t make it to the top. Our top tip is: don’t use hashtags that are too viral! They undoubtedly won’t bring you the traffic you’re hoping for. Stick to niche and medium-size hashtags, and… thank us later 🙂
