8-Post Hashtag Challenge Framework

The 8-Post Hashtag Challenge is a framework we’ve developed to help you gather valuable insights on as many hashtags as possible across a short period of time. This is a repeatable framework that will allow you to optimize your hashtags in a tailored way, over and over again.

By the end of the challenge, you will have found and used 60 quality hashtags that are tailored to your Instagram account, across 8 different posts. Each hashtag will be used on at least 4 different posts ensuring that you have tried it in a variety of combinations and given it a fair opportunity to perform. By doing this you can be confident when it comes to making the decision to keep or replace hashtags as you reoptimize your Collections. 

To help you on your journey we’ve also created a posting schedule so that you always know exactly which hashtag sets to use on which posts. (More on that later).

To execute the challenge we’ll be following Beste Özmen's strategy of creating groups based on hashtag size. This means we will be creating hashtag groups according to the number of posts they contain. And, all hashtags included in those lists will be tailored to your Instagram account’s engagement levels.

For reference, Beste’s account has around 3,400 followers and is getting upwards of 6,000+ Impressions from hashtags on most of her posts!

Are you ready to learn how you're going to start targeting hashtags to prepare for the challenge? Watch the next video.

Breaking down your content and target audience

You will obtain the best results by using hyper-relevant and content-specific hashtags. So, a natural first step to take before jumping into our hashtag research and strategy planning is to pre-empt the type of content you will be posting and the audiences you want to target.

We are working towards a list of 5-8 unique keywords or existing hashtags to represent sub-niches related to our content and target audience. We'll use these later on when it comes to researching hashtags. It also helps to take a look at what hashtags are being used by accounts similar to yours and note these down too.

The best way to do this is by looking at your existing content and breaking it down into a few categories - Once completed, you can tick this off your module checklist! This shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes!

The more keywords you write down, the easier your research will be! (This is the first assignment for this module).

Here's an example using Beste's account, who is in the travel niche.

Overall Niche: Travel

Sub-niches:

• Backpacking

• Travel guide

• Travel photography

• Budget Travel

• Girl Traveler

Once you've completed the assignment it's time to move onto the next lesson. 👇 

Posting schedule and storing hashtags

Within this lesson, you'll learn more about the execution of the 8-Post Hashtag Challenge and exactly how you're going to reach your end goal of having quality data across 60 different hashtags.

Congratulations on getting this far! Now that you have clearly outlined the categories you’ll be focusing on for your hashtag research, it’s time to create some Collections that match up with Beste’s strategy and the 8-Post Hashtag Challenge framework.

And, to give you an idea of how this looks, we’ve created a schedule to make things easier! (We have also provided a version that you can download and set as your background so that you can have your schedule with you at all times, and never miss a post).

As you can see, you will need to create 6 Hashtag Collections, each of which will hold 10 hashtags. And, because we are using Beste’s strategy, each Collection will group hashtags by the number of total posts that have been made in them. We’d advise using the exact names we've outlined below to make your life easier!

• Set 1 | 5-50k

• Set 2 | 50-100k

• Set 3 | 100-250k

• Set 4 | 250-500k

• Set 5 | 500k - 1M

• Set 6 | 2M+ 

⚡️Assignment: Head to Flick and create 6 Hashtag Collections, so they're ready for the next module. If you're not a Flick user, we'd suggest starting a free trial, or you can manually create lists in whichever format works for you. You can create a Collection in Flick by heading to the folder icon in the left sidebar within Flick, click ‘+ new Collection’, and give it a name!

If you get stuck, watch the video lesson where Ben takes you through creating a Collection in Flick. If you don’t have a Flick account, you can start a 7-day free trial that can be canceled at any time.