Instagram Hashtags Best Practices

Talking about hashtags and their practices is never boring. Many people say that hashtags are no longer effective, while others are still using many in their posts.

Today, in this article, we are going to see how can we optimize the use of the hashtags, to increase the reach and engagement on Instagram.

Using hashtags will make your post appear in Top & Recent posts.

top-recent-posts-instagram.jpg

In the “Recent Posts”, your post will be lost between many other posts quickly. So, the “Top Posts” is where your post should appear.

Now, how to reach the “Top Posts”? As per Instagram, it’s all about engagement: comments, likes, views and reshares. These engagements are important to feed ranking; this is how IG algorithm and the feed ranking work.

Let’s consider having 3 main sizes of hashtags:

  • Small: less than 200K posts

  • Medium: 200K - 1M posts

  • Big: 1M posts & above

hashtag-size.jpg

Whenever you are posting, mix your hashtags based on the number of followers that you have. Check out some details:

  • 1 - 10K followers: Use 20 Small | 8 Medium | 2 Big hashtags.

  • 10 - 50K followers: Use 15 Small | 10 Medium | 5 Big hashtags.

  • More than 50K followers: Use 10 Small | 15 Medium | 5 Big hashtags

Not to forget that content plays the bigger role when it comes to Instagram engagement, so make sure to create valuable one!