Lesson

2

Planning

Defining our target audience, content styles & setting out the strategy for the challenge.

Establish
Planning
Hashtag Research
Posting
Analyze

👋 Welcome

In this section, you'll learn how to plan, find, use and analyze hashtags. Everything is designed to help you leave with a quality understanding and a hashtag strategy that optimizes itself and improves results.

So, if you're ready to reach more people every time you post, let's move on to the lesson!

Categorize your content

Let's start by breaking our posts down into a few categories, so we know what hashtags are relevant to these categories later on. You can do this within your notes and it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes!

What we are working towards are different groups of hashtags that help describe your content. It's also worth looking at what types of hashtags similar accounts are using and note these down too. Below we’ve shown you an example of how this might look for Travel influencer Beste:

Travel

  • Backpacking
  • Travel guide
  • Travel photography
  • Budget travel
  • Girl traveller

Get to grips with your new plan

To complete this challenge we'll need to use 60 different hashtags, and, because we want to use each hashtag enough times to collect performance data, we'll be using them 4 times.

There's lots of different ways to structure your hashtag lists or Collections, but for this challenge, we're going to follow Beste Özmen's strategy of creating groups based on hashtag size. This means we will be creating hashtag groups according to the amount of posts they contain.

To note, if you feel like this structure doesn’t fit with the way you usually post, do your best to create collections of hashtags and use them as evenly as possible across 8 posts.  

Typically, hashtags that have a lower amount of posts are less competitive for your account, as you are more likely to rank in them. Hashtags with a higher amount of posts are more competitive, but if you rank in them your post is more likely to be seen by a larger audience. The thought process behind this strategy is having an even amount of competitive and non-competitive hashtags, in order to give your content the best chance. If your post starts getting traction due to a lower-level hashtag, it will be shown to more people, and may eventually land in the top 9 of one of your higher-level hashtags.

With the above in mind, and the aim of using 60 hashtags 4 times, we’re going to be creating 6 hashtag collections, and we’ll structure them in a similar way to Beste.

We will be creating six Hashtag Collections:

1k - 50k - 10 hashtags (hashtags that have 0-50k posts)

50k - 100k - (hashtags that have 50-100k posts)

100k - 250k - 10 hashtags (hashtags that have 100k-250k posts)

250k - 500k - (hashtags that have 250-500k posts)

500k-1M - 10 hashtags (hashtags that have 500k-1M posts)

2M+ - 10 hashtags (hashtags that have 2M+ posts)

⚡️Assignment: This is part of your homework - head to Flick and create 6 collections. Do this by heading to the folder icon on the left side of Flick, click ‘+ new collection’ and give it a name!

If you don’t have a Flick account, don’t worry you can start a 7-day free trial!

Our suggestion would be to name your Collections like this:

Set 1 | 0-50k

Set 2 | 50-100k

Set 3 | 100-250k

Set 4 | 250-500k

Set 5 | 500k - 1M

Set 6 | 2M+

And to give you an idea on how this looks across your posts, we’ve created a schedule to make things easier! (We’ve created a mobile image that you can set as your background to make it easier!)

We will be following this formula for posting:

  • 30 hashtags per post
  • Across 8 posts in total
  • With a total of 240 hashtags used
  • We will create 6 sets of 10 hashtags
  • And use each set 4 times across different posts

And here’s your new schedule:

Each set represents the hashtag set you’ll be using on the corresponding post. Remember, each set should contain 10 hashtags, and you should be the maximum of 30 hashtags on each post.

⚡️Now it's your turn

Break down the content you post into different categories based on your niche, and the type of content you publish. You can do this in the notes section of your phone, to get a good idea of what sort of themes you should be searching hashtags around.

Head to Flick and create 6 collections using the structure outlined above.

Download or print out the hashtag schedule, and put it somewhere you can see it. This will remind you to tick off each post as and when you do it, so you stay on the right track when you’re working on the challenge.


Let's recap!

  • Think about the different categories your posts could potentially fit into when it comes to the initial planning stage of your hashtag strategy. It’s important to consider that the hashtags make sense according to what you’re actually posting.


  • Remember to include a mix of competitive and less-competitive hashtags, as this will help you propel your posts to new heights.


  • Make this plan suit your posting schedule. Don’t worry if you only post a few times a week or everyday, the challenge will still apply to you!

Lesson

2