If you’re like me, you probably don’t know how hashtags work. For years I was adding random words or phrases with a hash symbol in front of them because everybody was doing it. It turned out that hashtags are a powerful method of content discovery and promotion.

Hashtags make your posts discoverable.

Whenever you add a hashtag to your post, it gets indexed by Instagram’s search engine. Moreover, if you use popular hashtags, your content would appear in the feeds of people who subscribe to a hashtag. Finally, if someone will click on a hashtag elsewhere, there’s a chance they will see your content.

So head to the Instagram search and switch to the hashtag tab. Search for hashtags in your niche and pay attention to the suggestions. You will also see a number of posts with a given hashtag. This will give you an idea of its popularity. Now you can start writing down your hashtags and looking for related ones. I’d recommend searching for them in the mobile app and writing them in a separate note along with the number of posts.

Choose right hashtags

Make sure you choose hashtags right. If you will use overly popular ones, there’s very little chance of being noticed. There are a lot of people posting to hashtags like #love, #inspiration, and #life. The latter has more than 240 million posts at the moment of writing, with about five posts added every hour. You would have a hard time trying to keep up with this frequency.

On the other hand, if you will use hashtags with a small number of posts, there will be a much lower chance for your posts to gain visibility. I wouldn’t recommend using tags that have less than ten thousand posts or more than 20 thousand. That will ensure that your content is visible on the hashtag page if you are posting often enough.

Make sure to check how often content is being posted to a hashtag. To do that, click on a tag is the search results and go to the hashtag page. Then visit the first ten posts and notice the time of posting. An active hashtag will have people posting to it at least 3-4 times a day. You don’t want to use hashtags that are not active anymore because you won’t get any visits from them.

Evaluate the content posted to a hashtag. Is it relevant to your posts? Let’s say you want to post about relationships. If you look at #love posts, you’ll find that there are all kinds of posts, and most of them have nothing to do with relationships. People express all sorts of love — to their dogs, to an ice-cream brand or yoga. You would need more specific hashtag like #loveadvice. It will be more specific, making your content relevant to that audience.

When you visit a hashtag page, you will see related hashtags in the header. Instagram is not showing the number of posts per hashtag here so you will have to visit each hashtag’s page by clicking on it. But don’t let this additional effort frighten you — related hashtags are a great way to explore and find new tags to use. Sometimes I think that phrases that pop up there would never cross my mind.

How to use hashtags

You can add as many as 30 hashtags to a post. I would highly recommend you adding as much as possible because the more tags you add, the more people will see your content. I don’t know why you shouldn’t do that, though some Instagram experts recommend limiting that number to only ten. I personally never had any problems with 30 tags per posts and never saw the difference when experimenting with many tags per post. If you are concerned that your followers might be annoyed by the massive blueish amount of text in every post, then you are right. There are specific ways to hide them without losing the benefits.

To hide hashtags or any other information from the list view you can add new lines to post description. Instagram wraps long descriptions showing only first line or first X characters (I haven’t counted the exact number. Add your caption and then a bunch of newlines, followed by all your hashtags. Make sure to put a dot or a dash at the beginning of every newline because otherwise Instagram parser will remove it. Adding a newline on the phone is also non-obvious. To do that switch to the numeric keyboard and in the bottom right corner, you will see a “return” button.

Using hashtags on a daily basis is not that trivial. It would be tedious to add them by hand to every post so I suggest you keep a set of notes arranged by occasion so that you can quickly copy and paste. I also like to keep a spreadsheet where each hashtag has a topic and the number of posts in it because it’s worth rechecking tags from time to time.

Discover people through hashtags

Hashtags are also a great way for business development. After researching the tags, you can start visiting profiles of people who post to them. They are very likely to engage your content if you’ve done your research right. You can also find influencers that often post to the hashtag and offer them help or collaboration. Earn their trust, and maybe they will tell their audience about you.

Make sure to engage with others. Don’t just like their posts, but also follow them and leave comments. Remember that when you post a comment under somebody’s post, others will see it too and will be curious to check out who you are. The more people you engage with, the faster you following grows. Make sure to send messages to those who follow you. It will keep your followers engaged and happy.

I haven’t found any hashtag research tools.

I am sure there are ways to speed up and improve hashtag research. Good old default Instagram search on my mobile device seems to be faster and more robust than any app that I found on the internets. If you know right tool to do the work — please shoot me an email.