How To Find The Best Hashtags

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This is a quick tip I learned to scale by hashtag use. Although it takes some time its well worth doing. You’ll need an open document or scratch pad to do this excercise as well an an Instagram account.

Start by heading to the “Discover” tab on Instagram. This is the magnifying glass on the bottom bar menu.

You’re going to create lists of topics that relate to the topic you’re posting about on Instagram. For this exercise, we are going to compile lists of hashtags for a travel blogger posting on Instagram. So I’m going to search for the term “travel” under hashtags.

Once you’ve gotten your keyword hashtag you’re going to look through the related hashtags. Start adding these to your list. However, you want to find ones that have a MIX of how many posts it has been used in. So travel has been used in 471 million posts so this means you’ll have LOTS of competition using this hashtag. Look for ones that have lower counts also. If you keep all of your tags above 100k posts you’ll have a hard time getting pinpoint engagement.

This is a great way to build an aresenal of hashtags to use. I personally have 30 lists that I’ve compiled this way - each with 25 hashtags. You can post 30 hashtags per Instagram post. I like to use these compiled lists with 5 new hashtags that are photo specific every time I post. Using hashtag lists made this way has raised my Instagram traffic brought by hashtags up by 15%-30% from brainstorming lists myself! It also is SUPER easy to put together posts now and I can focus on captions instead of hashtags!