The Ultimate Guide To Hashtags!

First thing you need to know is ​that you need to stay away from using generic hashtags when making a post on Instagram. For example, If I am posting a new west coast type beat of mine, I will not target the hashtag Cali. One reason I am staying away from that hashtag is because it is filled with 38.9 million posts! Another reason I am going to stay away from this hashtag is because the types of posts that are used with that hashtag are not geared towards my music video post. What ends up happening is that my post will get lost in that very competitive hashtag and then will not perform as well as I had hoped. 

Second, you always want to use 30 hashtags in your posts. Each hashtag, if targeted correctly, is an opportunity to land on the explore page or the top 9 of that hashtag that you used. So if your goal is to grow your page as much as possible, make sure to use 30 hashtags on all of your posts. 

For this next part, you need to understand that hashtags are separated into 3 sections. Small, Medium, and Big hashtags. Small hashtags are hashtags that have between 10k-150k posts in them. Medium hashtags are the ones with around 200k-900k posts in them. Finally, Big hashtags are the ones with over 1 million posts in them. 

This brings me to my next point where I am going to give you a formula to use so that you can optimize your hashtags when posting on Instagram. 

For accounts under 1k followers use the following ratio 20 small hashtags and 10 medium hashtags. For accounts between 1k-10k use the following ratio. 20 small hashtags, 7 medium hashtags, 3 big hashtags. Lastly, for accounts between 10k-50k followers use the following ratio. 15 small hashtags, 10 medium hashtags, 5 big hashtags. 

​Next tip is that you want to make sure that you are not using banned hashtags. These hashtags have been identified by Instagram as ones that are filled with spam and inappropriate content. By using these, you will end up hurting your reach and your account will actually be negatively affected. One way to make sure that this doesn’t happen is to use a service that I use, which is Flick.tech. This website is great for hashtag research and analytics and will run an audit to make sure that you are not using banned hashtags on your posts. 

If you’d like even more information, be sure to check this video out where I give some more information!