Successful Instagram Stories Experiment

Optimizing your hashtags is a great best practice to make sure that your relevant audiences are finding and following you. There are a host of websites and apps that can help guide to using hashtags in a smart and manageable manner. When you use the right hashtags, you directly help Instagram organize and arrange your posts. This will help them reach people who value your products and your brand. But is important to know how to use them effectively.

There is a balancing act to using hashtags. You need to balance the ability to use common hashtags against the possibility of being squeezed out of trending and high-demand topics. This is similar to SEO in many ways. As you try to search for keywords in the Google search engine that are more generic, you will get more broad and generic results back.

Your business will do much better if you choose to rank for long-tail terms and curated hashtags. For example, if your business sells skincare products and solutions, using a hashtag such as #hyperpigmentation is more curated than going for an already very saturated hashtag like #skincareproducts or #beautyproducts. This directly targets an audience and consumers who may be looking for help with hyperpigmentation issues.

This is one of the main reasons why you need to provide some “long tail” hashtags in your posts. It will make it easier for your posts to compete with thousands, sometimes millions, of others using common hashtags. It is also wise to stay abreast of trending topics and use trending hashtags on your posts because it is current, and many people follow what’s new and relevant.

In 2018 Instagram enabled the capability for followers to follow hashtags. This enables users to stay up to date on new posts that feature certain hashtags that they deem relevant to them. It is also wise for your business to follow certain hashtags to stay in the loop on the content that is being generated and it could help you identify new trends and inspire your own feed. 

There are even websites and apps that will help you generate the best hashtags to use based on your brand and show you how other competitors are performing with those hashtags. Websites such as Ingramer.com and apps such as #HashMe are the perfect place to start if you need to get insight on what could work for your business.