Are Hashtags really helpful for wide reach?

Deriving from the hash sign (#) of your mobile phones, hashtag is now the most popular tag on the social media platforms for the users to search the content easily. Widely spreaded through tweets on Twitter, hashtags are now an integral part of Instagram posts of people, slowly making its move in user’s Facebook posts too.

What does a hashtag do on Instagram?

Since we all know what a hashtag is and how we use it, what users fail to understand is how does a hashtag works. The hash symbol preceding a word under an instagram post makes the content discoverable for the millions of instagram users to make the search easier.

Let’s assume that you want to see the latest designs of rings on instagram, so you will just type #ringdesigns in the search bar. Thereupon, you will be provided with numerous pictures of rings to explore. When you use hashtag under a picture on Instagram, the text colour changes for the viewer to click on the hashtag and see more images with the same hashtag. Hashtags doesn’t allow you to use space or other special characters in between the words, so one should uses minimum words in a hashtag to make the search process easier.

You can never figure out the effectiveness of hashtags in your post because you have no access to analyse the insights of a hashtag. Although you can see the number of people using the hashtag, you cannot see how many people are searching for it or to many people that hashtag is reaching to!

Yes, there are also types of hashtags. What are they?

There are two types of hashtags:

Branded hashtag: 67% of people on Instagram use hashtags of their own brands for people to view all their posts on a single hashtag search. Branded hashtags encourage people to use your brand’s hashtag in their pictures of your product. Thus, those pictures will also show up in the same hashtag search for the audience to see the reviews of the people.  

Community hashtag : A community hashtag builds unknown audience, making your content or post discoverable for people on search. Community hashtags include generic words, letting the post to be shown in the search among thousand other posts. This helps in building followers that are unaware of your brand or page.

Which of these hashtags should you use?

This is a tricky question to be answered as both of the hashtags contributes in the followers of a page. A branded hashtag will generate the leads to customers of a business page depending upon the reviews posts of the customers, who used the same hashtag. Similarly, a community hashtag will generate more followers who could be your potential customers. You can fish about the trending hashtag, or the most influential hashtags of your industry through the search; however, you have to be wise to use them. Using the most used hashtag will lead to more competitors and the least used hashtag will not attract many followers.

But how do you use the hashtags effectively?

Well, Instagram allows you to use more than 30 hashtags but do you think using 30 hashtags in a post will increase your followers? No! Using four to five hashtags in a post is fine and effective to build followers. Hashtags categorize the content, making the search user intent. Therefore, you should use the right hashtag to get listed in a user’s search. Use different hashtags in every post to bring diverse followers, and track the engagement of your posts when you use them. Look out for not so spammy hashtags which everyone uses but nobody searches!

Using location and audience-specific hashtag will divert the needed traffic on your Instagram page. Usage of image relevant and unbranded hashtags will be equally effective.

Failure to use hashtags renders Instagram content to be virtually private, and not promoting the business of the user!