The Power of Hashtags
Hashtags, you know… they always start with #, but they won’t work if you use spaces, punctuations, or other symbols.
Why should you use hashtags?
Other people, including your target audience, are following certain hashtags. So, if you’re posting Instagram content with these hashtags, then it’s likely to pop up in their feeds.
For example, if you use #style on your Instagram posts, then someone who follows that hashtag will see your post in their feed. You might gain some new followers this way.
So, including hashtags is a free way to push your content to an interested audience. So, you really should thoughtfully use them!
How many hashtags should you use?
It really depends on the platform!
Let’s take Instagram. You should include at least a few hashtags, but also not too many. You can add, for instance, up to 30 hashtags to an Instagram post, but the common belief is that you better limit your usage to 5 or 15 max.
The recommended number of hashtags are:
- Instagram: 5–15
- Facebook: 1–2
- YouTube: 2–3
- LinkedIn: 1–2
- Pinterest: 2–5
How to manage your hashtags?
Do you have a structured process to keep track of the most important hashtags related to your brand?
It’s bad practice to come up with hashtags when you want to publish your content: you will forget to include some important hashtags, and you will spend more time than needed.
You can use my tool ‘ContentPlanner.io’ if you want to manage your hashtags (and your content) more professionally. It has a mechanism to organize your hashtags in lists.
Remark: You can create a (forever) free account by going to ContentPlanner.io and clicking the ‘Create Free Account’ button.
Later, when you create a new social post, you don’t have to search for hashtags; instead, you can select your hashtags from your most relevant hashtag list(s). Or even better, you let ContentPlanner.io randomly choose some hashtags from your lists.
For instance: in the screenshot below, I opened my Instagram post details. There you have a ‘Select’ button on the Hashtags row (see arrow in the image below).
If you already prepared one or more hashtag lists, you can easily select them by pressing this ‘Select’ button.
You will get a popup window as shown below:
Here you can (see matching numbers in the image above):
- Select the individual hashtags that you want to include in your post
- Or you can randomly select any number of hashtags from this list.
- Finally, you press the import button to place these hashtags in your post.
And then you see the selected hashtags in your post:
The procedure above assumes that you already have a hashtag list. In the following section, we will illustrate how you can create your own hashtag list(s)
How to create a hashtag list
On your dashboard, you have a card called “Keywords & Hashtags”:
From this card:
- you can go to an overview screen of all your keyword & hashtag lists
- or you can create a new list
Let’s press on the ‘plus’ icon to create a new list and (see also image below):
- Select type ‘Hashtags.’
- Give your list a name.
Then you can press the save button (see label 3).
Now your list is created, and you can press the pen icon of the Hashtags section (see arrow in the image below):
Then you can start to add your hashtags to your list.
Tips: you can add multiple hashtags at once: separate them with a space or a new line.
Add all the necessary hashtags to your list and press the save button when you’re finished (button 1):
And, from now on, you can select these hashtags inside any of your posts, as illustrated in the beginning!
Conclusion
Adding the right hashtags to your posts is crucial. We illustrated how ContentPlanner.io could help you to organize your tags in lists. Whenever you create a new social post, you can easily select them from your lists.
Let me know if you have remarks, questions, or suggestions!
