Hashtag Research

Something to remember:

Before we get started with the hashtag research, there’s a few things we thought would be important for you to keep in mind as you go. You can write these down somewhere to remind yourself and keep by you, when you’re doing your hashtag research.

1. Use a variety of hashtags that you’ve already noted from your competitor accounts (your assignment from lesson one), and what you have been using before as well as new hashtags that you find in Flick.
2. Try to find hashtags from different sub-niches of your topic across all your collections, these we outlined in lesson 2?
3. Try to use a wide variety of hashtag sizes - each set should have some hashtags with high competition and some hashtags with low competition.
4. Make sure the hashtags are relevant using our 'preview' featured content feature (shown below).

Finding hashtags for sets:

Hashtag research takes time, but the reward of having a quality set of hashtags means you can be reaching 30%+ more people every-time you post. To reiterate, we have had accounts with less than 100 likes a post reach 2,000+ people per post using hashtags. But, it took them time to find the hashtags that were relevant and a good size for their account.

“Having a quality set of hashtags means you can be reaching 30%+ more people every time you post.”

Now that you’re ready, let’s start searching! The best way to find the right hashtags is by opening up your search tool in Flick. You should start by entering hashtags you already know of, that are within your niche, or used by your competitors as a basis for initial searches.

Remember, we’re looking to find hashtags that are relevant to your account, niche & audience, as well as the right size!

‍Making your first few searches

Start by making a search without any filters using a hashtag you know that exists within your sub-niche, as an example, for photography we could try #wanderlust.

Once you’ve made a search you’ll see a list of related hashtags.

We’re now going to do two things:

Fitler our results so that we:

1. Remove hashtags that are too competitive (using average likes)
2. Focus our search to one hashtag list at a time (Using media count)

‍Filtering out hashtags that are too competitive - some suggestions:

These are broad suggestions that you can use to get started with, however, you can change and adjust these based on your own strategy or what you might have had success with in the past.

Filtering out hashtags that are too competitive using the average likes you receive on your posts:

In our search tool, you can set filters by the average number of likes received on the top performing content of a hashtag. Posts with a lower amount of likes are generally easier to rank on, and posts with a high like count are slightly harder.

You can change your filters each time you search, different niches will have a different number of hashtags within each range.

Here’s some suggestions on the ideal filter you should use, based on the average number of likes received on your content:

‍0 - 200 likes on your posts:

• add a filter that removes hashtags with more than 800 average likes.

200 - 600 likes on your posts:

• add a filter that removes hashtags with more than 1200 average likes.

If you have 600 - 1200 likes on your posts:

• add a filter that removes hashtags with less than 400 likes
• also add a filter that removes hashtags with more than 2000 likes.

If you have 1200 - 2000 likes on your posts:

• add a filter that removes hashtags with less than 600 average likes
• also add a filter that removes hashtags with more than 3000 average likes

If you have 2000+ likes on average:

• add a filter that removes hashtags with less than 1200 average likes.
  

Setting filters to focus on one hashtag list at a time:

Using the ‘total posts’ filter, you can tell Flick the range you’d like to see for your results:

Here’s an example of some filters for our first hashtag list ‘Set 1 | 0-50k’

Storing hashtags:

Once your filters are applied, you can start searching based on the keywords you have collected. Each time you search, you will be given suggestions based on that search of low to high competition level. It’s important when you are saving these hashtags, that you sort them into correctly categorized groups, so it makes them easier to identify and use when you go to post.

For this challenge in-particular we’ve already created our collections in lesson 2.

📝 Here’s some tips:

• Use good naming conventions when you store your hashtags in different Collections, that make choosing sets easy!
• E.G: Topic - Set number | (Vegan Food - Set 1)
• E.G: Topic - Set competition | (Vegan Food - low competition)
• ‍E.G: Topic - Set size | (Vegan Food - 0-100K)
  

• Download Flick’s mobile app so you can access your hashtags on the go and easily copy different groups!
  

• Download this image and set it as your phone background so your schedule is always there for you.