If you are struggling with low engagement in your Instagram posts then these Instagram Hashtags Best Practices can help you improve the engagement.
One of the lifelines of Instagram is Hashtags. That is the pivot around which content marketing on Instagram works.
Hashtags for Instagram is what Keywords are for SEO. Just as keywords get your content found on search engines, Hashtags get your content found on Instagram.
The fact that, not a lot of marketers are using hashtags on Instagram proves that the awareness of the importance of hashtags amongst marketers who are wanting their piece of the Instagram pie, is very low.
On surveying some of these marketers and asking them as to why they are not using hashtags, their response was something common – that they were not aware of researching and finding the best hashtags for their content and that they did not feel that the commonly used hashtags were doing any good.
You should be able to understand the importance of hashtag from a simple example; the use of a hashtag “#followforfollow” or, its variants can get you a lot of followers on Instagram. It means that people are using hashtags to search for content on Instagram.
Researching and finding the best keywords for your content requires a planned approach and it is the same for Hashtags as well.
And in this episode of the dkspeaks podcast, we will be discussing about Instagram hashtags best practices.
Instagram Hashtags Best Practices
First things first.
If you want to make the most of using Hashtags, it is important that you maintain a list of hashtags for your content, that you will be using in each of your posts on Instagram.
So it is important to be prepared. And preparation primarily means researching hashtags, identifying the best ones that can help your content be found and keeping this handy in a notepad so that you can just copy and paste it into your Instagram posts.
Researching and finding Hashtags is not as difficult as it is for Keywords. A simple 4 step method can help you do it and these 4 are more or, less the only ways of finding hashtags as of now.
How to find the Best Instagram Hashtags
Let us look at these 4 steps to finding hashtags for Instagram.
Branding Hashtags
Firstly decide on a branding hashtag that you would like to use. Branding hashtags help create a brand around your business and also helps your business stand out from the crowd. Let us check out some example of how big brands are using branding hashtags.
Nike uses their branding hashtags #justdoit in almost all their posts. You can see this while browsing their posts on Instagram.

Kitkat is another brand that uses a branding hashtag very nicely. They use a branding hashtag #HaveaBreak in all their posts.

Branding hashtags are very powerful in establishing yourself as a brand and in starting a campaign around your brand. For marketers who are starting out, a branding hashtag might not be of a lot of relevance right away. But in due course when you build a following on Instagram, you will realize the importance of a branding hashtag.
A branding hashtag necessarily need not be a single hashtag. It can be multiple hashtags as well. Spend time to brainstorm and decide on what your branding hashtag will be.
A Friendly Google Search
The next method is as simple as heading over to google and doing a quick search to find relevant hashtags.
Here are some of the results when I searched for “best hashtags in blogging”. You will see hundreds of resources including blog posts which will hand over a list of the best hashtags in the blogging niche.

You could use this search term in any niche and get a list of readymade hashtags. You might have to spend some time picking the best ones out of it, after doing some careful research of which ones are doing we...