How to Develop a Hashtag Strategy
Social media can feel tedious, but it’s also one of the best marketing tactics to keep your brand top-of-mind. Social media provides an opportunity for brands to interact and engage with loyal customers and future patrons.
This is all the more reason to grow your following — when you have more followers, you’ll have more customers. One way to grow your followers is by developing a targeted hashtag strategy. By using hashtags in your Instagram and Twitter posts, you can get discovered by new audiences, increase your follower count and improve engagement rates.
Why are hashtags important?
In 2020, hashtags are still a quick, yet effective marketing tactic to grow your followers.
“A post with at least one Instagram hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than posts without a hashtag.”
That statistic says it all!
If you’re offering an online product or remote service, hashtags are a great way to expand your reach beyond friends and family in Lincoln, Nebraska. Hashtags help you create a geographically broader audience which is great for building your email list for your next workshop!
How to Find the Best Hashtags
People can follow or explore certain hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. Hashtags then aggregate all the posts that mention that particular hashtag.
With so many options for hashtags, it can be overwhelming to choose which ones to use. I use this tool to generate hashtags. You can do up to 30 hashtags on Instagram per post, and on Twitter it’s best practice to only include two.
Here’s a set I generated from the word Ayurveda:
#ayurveda #yoga #ayurvedalifestyle #health #ayurvedalife #ayurvedic #wellness #ayurvedicmedicine #meditation #india #ayurvedaeveryday #healthylifestyle #natural #vegan #ayurvedafood #organic #pitta #vata #kapha #massage #holistichealth #holistic #skincare #beauty #herbal #selfcare #ayurvedatreatment #healing #healthy
4 Hashtag Strategy Best Practices
Mix it up — don’t copy and paste the same hashtag group in every post. Instagram will think you’re a bot and push your posts lower. I recommended that you have 5 to 10 sets that you rotate. Some of the words will be the same in all of the posts. For example, Ayurveda, yoga, wellness and healing might be 4 you always use. The other 26 can vary.
Include widely-used and less popular hashtags — hashtags are similar to SEO where you want to include a range of volume per keyword. For example, #instagood is one of the most popular hashtags. You could pair it with #crystalhealing which is not as widely-used.
Use hashtags wherever you can — Did you know you can include hashtags in your Instagram stories? And your Twitter and Instagram bios? Everytime you use a hashtag, you’ll see an increase in reach, so I recommend using relevant hashtags in your stories and profiles.
Keep your hashtags tidy — Put your hashtag group in the first comment, so your caption looks neat and tidy. You can schedule that first comment on Later.com too.
If you start posting hashtags on your posts I bet you will see a big uptick in your followers and views! I did this for the first time last spring and there was a significant jump.
