How to Build a Hashtag Strategy Using Flick

Need help building the perfect hashtag strategy for your Instagram account? By using Flick, you can start building the perfect strategy.

Posted 3 years ago

Written by

Mackenzie Taylor

Posted 3 years ago

When it comes to building a hashtag strategy in 2023, it can be daunting, confusing, and downright exhausting. Each day we’re being bombarded with how many hashtags you *should* be using (Use 3! Use 10! Use 30!), which ones will help you reach the Explore page if you should be using them in comments or in your caption—the list goes on and on and on.

Lucky for you, we’re here to streamline the process and make finding quality hashtags that work (yes, work!) simple and easy. If you want to learn how to find hashtags that will help your account rank and grow your Instagram, you’ve come to the right place.

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How to find quality hashtags on Instagram

How to find quality hashtags on Instagram

When it comes to finding quality hashtags, there is a fairly easy solution that we’ve broken down into three parts:

Start with your competitors
Broaden your options with a hashtag service (like Flick!)
Find the perfect hashtags for your account

1. Start with your competitors

When it comes to Instagram hashtags, thousands of people before you have created content, reached new audiences that are similar to yours, and, essentially, have done a majority of the work for you. Huzzah!

So one of our favorite things to do when getting started on finding quality hashtags is to look at your competitors!

Let’s say you’re a London-based fashion blogger who tends to get 300 to 400 likes per photo. To start off, search #londonfashionblogger to find and locate a few accounts that look similar to your niche and following. Start selecting a few of the photos that look similar to the content you make and look through their hashtags.

You can find the hashtags the user posted by checking:

The captions of their posts
The first comments in their posts

Be sure to pick out a few varying hashtags and note them down.

If you’re a #londonfashionblogger, you might note down hashtags like:

#londonstreetstyle

#ukfashionstyle

#londonfashion

#streetstyleuk

Hashtags & Analytics

Find, manage, and analyze hashtags for Instagram.

2. Broaden your options with a hashtag service (like Flick!)

Now that you have a good starting list for your hashtags, it’s time to start building on that, baby! How do you do that? By using a hashtag service, of course!

With Flick, you can take the hashtags that you found on your competitors’ posts and search them within the app for even more hashtags!

Sidenote: Make sure you don’t have any search filters active so you can find the most diverse set of related hashtags possible!

With each hashtag you search for, you’ll see a list of the low, medium, and high competition hashtags that are similar. Now, as you can’t use every single one of these hashtags (you’re limited to 30 on Instagram!), it’s time to start narrowing down which ones to use.

This is when those lovely filters are going to come in handy for you! We suggest turning on Flick’s suggested filters that are related to your very own account.

So, using the example above, if you’re a fashion blogger that gets 300-400 likes per photo, apply filters that:

Ensure the average likes of the hashtags returned are less than 400.
Ensure that there are more than 5,000 posts per hashtag returned (you want to make sure people are actually using the hashtag!)

And voila! Click search and start selecting the most appropriate and relevant hashtags as you go. Be sure to look at your competition score and potential reach numbers (these are very important and you can find more about why here) to make sure you can rank on the hashtag.

3. Find the perfect hashtags for your account

Remember that the hashtags that you see after searching are the ones that are the most optimized for your account size and reach, so your job is to find the most relevant ones.

Top tip: Hashtag strategy is hard and can take some time! Don’t be discouraged if your hashtags don’t rank immediately. Start experimenting and focus on optimizing once you have gotten the hang of how to search for the most relevant hashtags.

Once you’ve selected the relevant hashtags for your content, you can either copy them onto your clipboard or add them to a collection. We advise building up your collections so that when it comes time to post, you can quickly pick and choose which hashtags you need and want from different groups.

4. Use Flick’s AI Assistant

If you have a caption written, post it into Flick’s Scheduler and click “generate hashtags.” From here, the AI Assistant will do the hard work of searching for the best hashtags for your content in seconds. In a separate pop-up, you’ll get hundreds of hashtags to choose from that are completely based on your caption and your account.

With building a hashtag strategy, it takes time but looking at what your competition is using and searching for those hashtags in Flick can really save you a lot of time and energy. If you’re looking for even more help and guidance on building a hashtag strategy, take our online course to help you dig even further into the world of hashtags.

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