The Essentials

Like any good story, the best place to start is from the beginning. Before building up your knowledge and using more advanced tactics, you need to get to grips with the basics. Set a pace that works for you, and don’t rush – your Instagram hashtag strategy is a marathon, not a sprint.

If you've already got a good understanding of hashtags, that doesn't mean you should skip this step (and all of the other steps in the Establish module). There's nothing wrong with refreshing your knowledge around the fundamentals of using hashtags effectively, in order to build a solid strategy.

Although hashtags are typically known for improving the reach of your posts and casting your net out to a wider audience, there's a lot more to it than you may first think...

How do hashtags really help?

1. They help match your Instagram account to Instagram's algorithm. If you use hashtags that are related to fitness, they'll know the best fitness-loving audiences to push your content to.

2. Hashtags can help get immediate eyes on your posts. Did you know that most Flick users who follow a hashtag strategy are getting 70% of their post Impressions via hashtags?

3. When people search on Instagram, they search by hashtags - they are Instagram's search tool. This means that if you use the right hashtags, you can get your content in front of an audience who are already actively looking for posts like yours. It’s much easier to convert people already looking for your content. 

4. Instagram’s machine learning technology favours content that is well-labeled, and if you do this using hashtags, your posts will be shown to a wider audience.

Growth Principles

A successful hashtag strategy is built on stable foundations, derived from core principles. And, understanding these principles will allow you to feel confident that the decisions you make will lead to quality results.

Here are the core principles for using Instagram hashtags:

📊 Impressions are achieved from 'ranking' on a hashtag: On a hashtag, there is a 'top posts' feed and a 'recent' feed. When using hashtags to increase your reach, your aim is to get your post to rank as highly as possible on the top posts feed - generally, the higher you rank the more Impressions your posts will gain.

You've most likely heard of the 'top 9' posts in a hashtag before, but you can still get results below this point - At Flick, we split the top posts feed into the following categories:

• Top 9 posts

• 10th - 25th

• 25th - 50th

• 50th - 100th

🌄 Relevancy: The more relevant your hashtags are, the better the results you'll get - Instagram wants to provide the best user experience for its audiences, which means giving hyper-targeted content. The more accurately you label your content, the more relevant an audience the platform can serve your posts to, and in turn, increase your reach!

🙅‍♀️ Hashtag Competition/Size: Some hashtags are more competitive than others, and you can gauge the level of hashtag's competition by looking at its 'Average Likes' (the average engagement levels of the people who are appearing in the top-posts section of a hashtag) - something we’ll cover more in-depth in the 'Hashtag Research' module.

📸 Content is still king: Hashtags will help excellent content reach more people, but they can't save content that isn’t high quality. Make sure your content is both attention-grabbing and matches/exceeds the quality of the posts that are currently doing well on the hashtags you're targeting.

⏱ Balance: You will get different levels of results depending on the amount of time you put in, however, it's more important to create a strategy and workflow that fits your schedule and the time you have available - it doesn't have to be 110% at all times.

Here's a formula that you can refer back to at any point! 👇

4 Common Hashtag Mistakes to Avoid

With so much information about hashtags easily accessible online, it can be hard to understand what advice or rules to follow. A quick and easy way to initially improve your success rate with hashtags is to avoid the common mistakes that people make when it comes to their hashtag use.

Don't use broad & highly competitive hashtags

It’s important to pay attention to your niche when you are creating a list of hashtags to use on your posts. When you are posting your content, it's easy to fall into the trap of picking broad and top-level hashtags like ‘#fashion’, ‘#fitness’, or ‘#lifestyle’, but by planning ahead, you could use hashtags that are hyper-relevant, and a better size for your account. This will give you a higher chance of ranking on a hashtag, taking you from 100 impressions via hashtags to 5,000.  

💡 Tip: If you’re struggling to think of hashtags that are more ‘niche’ take a look at your competitors' accounts and see what hashtags they are using. You can add these to your list, or plug them into Flick to find related hashtags. 

Don't use the same 30 hashtags every post

We frequently see people who are just getting started using the same 30 hashtags on their posts, regardless of the content. Get specific as often as possible - the more matched up your posts are to your hashtags, the more likely you are to reach more of the right people.

An additional benefit is that by diversifying your tags, you're more likely to reach new audiences more frequently, rather than reaching the same people over and over.

Don't use banned/flagged hashtags

By using banned hashtags on your posts, it's possible you may be limiting your content to reaching its full potential. Hashtags can become banned or flagged overnight and they change frequently based on people reporting content. Fortunately, you can use Flick's Smart Audit / Banned Hashtag Checker to check hashtags in your Collections or before you copy them to your clipboard - helping you feel safe about the hashtags you are using.

Don't give up after one or two posts

We've said it before, and we'll say it again (7 more times to be exact) building an Instagram Hashtag Strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. If you don't get results from the get-go, don't worry and don't give up. The most important thing about this course is setting the foundations and extracting key learnings for what you will be doing in the future.