Mastering Instagram Hashtags
By: Jasem Karrar
Tags: Instagram Stories, Instagram Hack, Instagram, Instagram Marketing, Hashtag

According to Instagram, over 95 million pieces of content are shared on the platform each day. How do you keep track of all that information? Hashtags have become our best hope — and Instagram uses them really well. If a librarian like old Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal Classification system, was around today, he’d give hashtags a thumbs-up and a happy-face emoji wink wink.

Instagram hashtag

Where Did Hashtags Come From?

Twitter user Chris Messina created the concept of using the hashtag for social media conversations. On August 23, 2007, he tweeted a suggestion to use the # sign before the keyword or phrase as a method of categorizing conversations within the site. His innovation didn’t gain widespread acceptance immediately. People complained that including # signs made messages difficult to read.

The system gained real social acceptance later that year during the San Diego wildfires. The hashtag #sandiegofire became the organizing phrase that enabled people to communicate quickly and conveniently on the site. The method of using the # sign in front of a word or phrase, although distracting to people reading the message, proved very useful.

Twitter coined the name hashtag, and on July 1, 2009, the company began hyperlinking the hashtagged words together in search results, making the function of using hashtags very convenient. The list of social networks and related sites that have adopted this practice is fairly extensive.

How Instagram Uses Hashtags

So how do hashtags work on Instagram? When you share content on Instagram and include a hashtag in the caption, anyone can tap that hashtag and see other images that have used it too. The content is displayed via the Explore tab with three useful options. See below.

Instagram hashtag mastering

1. Related hashtags

As the name implies, this displays similar hashtags that may be of interest. There aren’t related hashtags for every hashtag, but for the more popular hashtags there are and it can be a useful way to identify similar user groups within a topic or industry.

2. The Top view

This view displays content that has the most engagement — the most likes and comments. The nice part about this feature is that the cream rises to the top. So if you’re trying to make yourself known using a specific hashtag and your content happens to be well liked, then viewers of that hashtag will likely see it, even long after you’ve shared the content. For example, when looking at the top content for #instagrampower, you can still see posts that came out during the initial book launch for the first edition in 2013 by scrolling down the feed just a bit, even though it’s been used over 1,500 times.

3. The Recent view.

As its name implies, this view shares the content with the most recent use of the hashtag at the top of the feed. For less popular hashtags, the most recent images will be visible toward the top for longer. For more popular hashtags, you’ll have to scroll farther down the feed to find them.

MARKETING STRATEGY TIP — HASHTAGS YOU CAN “TRY” TO CONTROL

If you include a very popular hashtag with your content, it will likely be shown at the top of the Recent feed for just a split second, and it will also be very hard to get ranked in the Top view for that hashtag. But if you include a less popular hashtag, it will stay on the top of the Recent feed for a longer period of time. It will also be much easier to get it to rank in the Top view. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle — hashtags that are used in your niche, but not so popular as to be hard to influence and impossible to be a leader in.

How to Use Hashtags

Hashtags have enormous utility for creative marketers. Let’s review a few of the powerful ways you can leverage them.

1. Include them on your posts to expand the reach of the content. You can include up to 30, but that is probably a little excessive.

2. You can create your own hashtags and use them creatively in your business for things like contests, promotions, and thought leadership.

3. You can look for hashtags, and now you can follow them as well, to research popular trends and participate in conversations within your industry or niche by commenting, liking, or sharing your own content using that hashtag.

4. You can identify new prospects by looking to see who is using relevant hashtags.

Create Your Own Hashtags

Creating your own hashtags enables a nice collection of marketing activities, including leading conversations and creating topics that rally customers and interested prospects in ad hoc conversations and sharing. Being the thought leader also positions you as the leader of your tribe. Creating a hashtag for a specific customer purpose also gives you the opportunity to ask people to use that custom hashtag as a social media reply device. This approach is what powers most Instagram contests, which we’ll cover more deeply in future.

Hashtags can be set up by anyone simply using the # symbol before a word or phrase. You can use any hashtag you’d like without needing anyone’s permission. That’s good news for creative types, but an obvious problem occurs — hashtag wars! When two dueling marketers try to use a hashtag for different purposes, things can get confusing. Hashtags can also be used in association with negative or inappropriate images, so practice care.

As a marketer, there are some best practices that you need to keep in mind when you start to consider how best to create and utilize hashtags. Let’s review them:

1. Be brief — use either one word or a short phrase.

2. Try to create a hashtag that is memorable and easily understood.

3. Check to make sure the hashtag is not open to multiple interpretations, or else it runs the risk of being used for the wrong purpose. Be careful here, weird things can happen.

4. Check to make sure the hashtag is not already in use before creating it. Make your hashtags unique or they’ll be used by others and therefore become more problematic as people use them for random things.

5. Don’t create hashtags that include another company’s brand or product name, except for rare occasions, like this book — please take a picture and share it using the #instagrampower and #instagrampowerbook hashtags.

6. Remember that once you set up a hashtag, it becomes a communication tool for anyone to use. What you popularize, others can hijack. You cannot control its use.

Research Trends in Your Niche

Even in a tiny niche, like the doll clothes market, there are new topics, trends, and concepts being created all the time. New competitors come into the market, new events happen, and industry news comes and goes. By following thought leaders in your industry and watching their use of hashtags, you can quickly keep your finger on the pulse of trending topics. Because of the visual nature of Instagram, this type of research is even more helpful for product sellers because you can get a quick look at new items you might not otherwise see.

hashtag research

Save and Cut and Paste

Search for terms through Instagram’s Explore tab until you discover what your niche’s customers are commonly using. Then consider making a list of the hashtags on your phone’s notes function so you can easily cut and paste them into your Instagram caption each time they are needed.

Find Prospects Using Hashtags

You have an opportunity to identify people who are interested in your niche or industry. Simply look to see who is sharing pictures using the related hashtags. This is a significant opportunity that is easy to do. You can also follow a hashtag. When you do that, you see the items shared that use the hashtag and you can quickly like and comment on the content.

The Great Placement Debate

In the early days of Instagram people were sensitive to not use more than a couple of hashtags, and they would frequently only place them in the first comment, rather than in the caption. Those practices have shifted. Now people use tons of hashtags, and they also include them in the caption. To make the caption statement stand out and not be crammed into one giant paragraph with a lot of hashtags, users often add a space or two under their comment, include a period or two, and then add all their hashtags. That separates them nicely from your written comments.

Join in the Sharing

In some industries or niches, using the common hashtags can feel like a giant waste of time, and it might be. But in other niches, participating in the trending topics is a simple way to engage with prospective customers. You’ll have to decide whether this is a good approach for your situation.

One indicator of whether your time will be well spent joining a conversation via a hashtag or using it for an Instagram image is whether you are (or your brand is) fairly well known and respected. If so, then you have an easy way to make a strong social impact. If not, then you’ll need to work much harder to make yourself known, and you’ll have to determine if that is time well spent. If you are a product marketer, the answer is probably a strong yes. If you are a service provider, then you’ll likely want to focus on local hashtags to connect with local prospects. As with all other forms ofadvertising, you probably need to take a long-term view and not make up your mind based on one or two attempts.

Cautionary Tales

As mentioned previously, companies have learned that hashtags can be hijacked and used for customer complaints. Hashtags are wild and free. Once created, they take on a power of their own. Creating a hashtag associated with your brand is the equivalent of setting up “open mic night” on the Internet. Be afraid, be very afraid. Setting up a popular hashtag and giving it prominence through your other media channels, only to have it constantly used to trash your company, is a PR nightmare. Be careful to consider your brand’s reputation in the marketplace and whether it might be wiser to simply participate in industry conversations rather than creating unique hashtags that can be used against you.

McDonald’s and the #McDStories Hashtag

McDonald’s learned this the hard way when it set up a Twitter hashtag campaign. The initial hashtag it created was #MeetTheFarmers, which the company used effectively to share stories of healthy produce and locally sourced ingredients. McDonald’s paid to promote the hashtag, so it gained wide prominence. A solid effort — no problems so far. But the second hashtag, #McDStories, was much more problematic.

Soon the hashtag was being used to share food poisoning stories, broadcast customer service complaints, mock the company with funny insults, and generally bash the brand. The anti-McDonald’s sentiment turned into a competitive sport. Twitter users took turns coming up with the most sarcastic tweets they could, and happily tacked on the #McDStories hashtag to broadcast their messages.

The initial error was only one layer of the ordeal. Social media bloggers also took the opportunity to publicly correct the company on its approach. Not only did McDonald’s receive mockery from the public; it received public criticism from social media marketers, too.

There are plenty of lessons to learn from the McDonald’s story. Let’s review them briefly:

A hashtag is a communication tool, and like any good tool, it can be used to build up or tear down. Hashtags are like a megaphone, and if you create one, it has power. If you take it a step further and advertise it on your other media channels, you give it even more prominence and power.

2. Crafting hashtags in a focused way that shapes the conversation in a direction of your choosing is wiser than making them more general. The #MeetTheFarmers hashtag didn’t provide an easy on-ramp to complaints like the #McDStories hashtag did.

3. Your brand resides in the mind of the consumer. If you ask people to share their thoughts publicly, you might be surprised at the level of negativity. Don’t expect them to be “on message.” In social media, this inability to control the message is particularly problematic for larger brands that have negative consumer sentiment to deal with. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t use social media; it means they should be careful how they structure the engagement.

Hashtag Dos and Don’ts

We hope these cautionary tales have helped clarify the importance of getting your plan nailed down when it comes to using hashtags. Let’s review a list of best practices.

Hashtag Dos

Do take the time to research the hashtags associated with your industry and learn how they are best used.

2. Do participate in the use of hashtags to extend your message to a broad audience.

3. Do look to see who is using your niche or industry hashtags and follow them.

4. Do use caution when creating new hashtags to ensure you can shape the dialogue as much as possible.

5. Do create hashtags that are brief and easily understood.

6. Do use websites that help you learn about new hashtags and keep up on trending topics.

Hashtag Don’ts

Don’t forget that hashtags are a tool that can be used to do damage.

2. Don’t underestimate the negative sentiment that might be bottled up about your brand and unleashed via hashtags.

3. Don’t create hashtags that are too general and open to broad interpretation or multiple meanings.

4. Don’t use general trending hashtags for marketing purposes.

5. Don’t create hashtags with brand names that you do not have express permission to manage.

6. Don’t overuse hashtags. Most people suggest using between 2 and 10, but no more. Technically you can add up to 30, but that is not recommended unless you’ve really considered the impact. Adding a long list of hashtags could make you look a little too desperate.

An Interview with a Hashtag Pioneer — Josh Decker

One of the most creative uses of hashtags I’ve ever seen is at professional sporting events. For example, at Seattle Mariners games, where the fan content was shared on the jumbotrons in near real-time as they posted using hashtags. Have you seen that at events you’ve attended? When I first saw it, I was blown away by the beauty of the idea — turning fans into the stars of the show. It’s one of my family’s favorite parts of the day! See below.

instagram hashtags

The company behind the technology is Seattle-based Tagboard, founded by Josh Decker. Tagboard partners with more than 200 major sports teams, and its technology is used at the largest events around the world. Tagboard also powers on-air sharing of social content for TV broadcasts. I asked Josh to share more about his journey and his perspective on hashtags:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Tagboard?

A: The idea for Tagboard came about because communities all over the world were using digital communication channels, but those conversations were disconnected. We wanted to connect these people. We wanted it to work across social networks and be opt-in. The hashtag became a way for people to connect. When I had the idea for Tagboard, it was 2010 — you should have heard me trying to explain this idea to my mom. She thought I was crazy. But we thought, Hey, we think this hashtag thing will catch on and spread, and we’ll have something pretty awesome to work with. And that’s the idea of what you see at a Mariners game. You use that hashtag and you get added to the pool of content that the Mariners team can choose to put up onscreen. It’s a way for the fan to get rewarded for communicating and connecting with the community.

Q: Was there a specific breakthrough moment when you realized this was going to be a commercially successful idea and that hashtags were going to power the idea?

A: It was the first time I saw a hashtag used in a commercial on TV. I’m an Audi guy. I had the idea for Tagboard because I was part of an Audi community and wanted to improve the way we communicated online. Audi, being a very digitally savvy brand, had the first commercial with a hashtag. It was a Super Bowl commercial in 2011, and I thought, Oh snap! We’re going mainstream. This was around the same time we launched the company. We’d been working on it for six months, but when I saw that hashtag, I knew we were on the right track.

Q: Is Tagboard just for big brands, or can smaller businesses use it too? What are some use cases that our audience might be surprised to read about?

A: Tagboard, when we started, was not supposed to be a software-as-a-service company. It was a user-focused tool. It was more about helping anyone connect with their community online. We didn’t get traction on the user side, but brands and marketers saw the value in it. We’ve proudly kept a free search option on our website that anyone can use. We’ve had over 5 million hashtags searched on our website.

The great thing is that we’re able to work with the NBA Finals, or World Cup, but we believe that it should be accessible to anyone. We have large enterprise-level solutions, but we also have our free search tool, so we’re able to serve anyone.

Q: At a social/cultural level, what do you think the highest and best use of Tagboard and hashtags is?

A: I continue to be blown away when Tag board is used to not only share breaking news, but to connect the people who are affected by that news. I’ve seen it used for earthquakes, wildfires, building fires, crane collapses, and shootings that are becoming way too common. Any time a big event happens, news networks are using Tag board to break the story, because Tag board is the only way to help them access that breaking news content, live from the scene, in real time, on any social network, giving them the ability to find that content and use it to tell the news and share updates and alerts from the government or other official sources.

Q: How have you seen the commercial use of hashtags change since 2011 ?

A: Hashtags started as a way to thread conversations, and we lost that at some point, but now I feel like we’ve gone from this attitude of “Who can come up with the cutest hashtag” to more of a foundational component of a marketing campaign. It’s cleaner, it’s to-the-point, and it’s more broadly used as a tactic to maintain consistency and relevance. You’re not seeing as much of the noise around hashtags, and we’re starting to see the signal come through. We’re seeing hashtags used for more longer-run evergreen campaigns. Hashtags have gone back to the community. It started there, and then marketers got ahold of it, and overdid it, and it became a marketing thing, and we’re seeing it shift back to a community orientation, even in the way marketers use them.

Q: Are there any tips or suggestions for readers that are trying to effectively use hashtags in support of their online work?

A: Listen to your community. If you’re trying to come up with a new hashtag for your campaign? Don’t. All you have to do is go online and see what your community is already using. Ninety percent of the time, the best way to come up with your hashtag is to listen to your audience. If you need to come up with your own, keep it short and simple.

Q: How about any cautions, warnings, or things to watch out for?

A: I’m always a fan of camel casing — capitalizing the first letter of a new word within the hashtag — because sometimes you can miss some double meanings that won’t show up otherwise. And don’t overdo it. Don’t force it. Communities are built on trust, and when they feel like you’re forcing something down their throat, they won’t trust you. At the end of the day, you can’t force it.

Q: If readers want to learn more about using Tagboard, what should they do?

A: Check out our website, tagboard.com, or scroll through our Twitter feed @Tagboard. We share a lot of the work our clients do on Twitter, so you can get a great taste for how the product works, and how it’s used in the real world.

SNAPSHOT

1. Hashtags are a great tool for engaging with customers.

2. Include them with your content as you share it.

3. Use hashtags to research your industry and connect with new prospects.

4. Remember that if you create a hashtag in association with your brand, anyone can use it, including haters.

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