By Caroline Forsey

Instagram hashtags are powerful.

They can help your posts reach a target audience, attract followers in your niche, increase engagement, and develop a more positive and recognizable brand image.

Here’s the thing, though: with great power comes great responsibility (#spiderman).

Hashtags can skyrocket your business to new heights, but if used too frequently or without a clear strategy in mind, they become pointless and inefficient.

While it can be hard to choose the right hashtags on Instagram, you don’t have to guess. Aside from this article, we’ve put together an ultimate course on using Instagram for marketing. In this course, we’ll teach you to not just attract followers, but to attract the right followers.

First, let’s go over Instagram hashtags specifically — and why they’re so important for your Instagram marketing strategy. We’ll cover the following topics:

• What is an Instagram hashtag?
• Why are hashtags important?
• Types of Instagram hashtags
• Best Instagram Hashtags
• Best practices for using hashtags on Instagram
• Top Instagram hashtags for 2021
• Trending Instagram hashtags
• How to use hashtags on Instagram for business
• How to search hashtags on Instagram

Why are hashtags important?

Hashtags are essentially Instagram’s sorting process. With around 95 million photos posted on Instagram every day, it’s difficult for Instagram to efficiently deliver the right content to the right people. Hashtags help your post get discovered by viewers most interested in seeing it.

Krystal Gillespie, HubSpot’s Social Media Community Manager, explains the importance of hashtags this way: “Hashtags are like a funnel. For instance, #marketing is incredibly broad and attracts all types of posts. We’ve found #digitalmarketing or #marketingmotivation gives us a more specific, targeted reach. The audience searching for these hashtags are also trying to narrow their search to what we offer related to marketing, so we’re actually reaching more of the right people.”

Essentially, hashtags are a better way to categorize your posts. They help you reach a target audience, and more importantly, they help your target audience find you. These users are more likely to engage with your post because it is exactly what they were looking for.

Types of Instagram Hashtags

Hashtags are highly versatile little pieces of text. They can build a community, make your account more visible, or simply attract like-minded individuals to your account.

Before choosing a group of hashtags for your posts, take a look at the most common ones you can use and their categorizations.

Best Instagram Hashtags for Companies

Whether you’re a social media manager at a company, an owner of a small business, or a sole proprietor, you can use the following hashtags to get more visibility on Instagram.

• Product or service hashtags. Companies use product hashtags for posts related to their product and service offerings. This will usually be general, such as …read more

  Source:: HubSpot Blog

        

  

  Author: Aaron