Instagram is a great social network for leveraging interesting visual content into more followers, traffic, and ultimately conversions for your business. One of the many ways to get more engagement and exposure with your images or videos is to tag them with relevant and or popular hashtags. This is basically optimizing your images for the search feature within Instagram. Here is how to use hashtags on Instagram.

How to Use Hashtags on Instagram

So if anyone is looking for content related to your hashtag, they’ll find a list of images and videos with that hashtag, sorted by recency.

To use a hashtag on Instagram, you simply have to place it in the caption section of your video or image. Just remember to put the pound sign (#) before any words you want to convert into a hashtag.

Let’s talk about the 3 major tips to keep in mind regarding how to use hashtags on Instagram.

1 – Keep Them Relevant

Make sure that your hashtags are relevant to your content. In other words, don’t just throw in a popular hashtag in order to piggyback on another trend. The idea is to use hashtags to get more exposure for your content, and you’ll only succeed in annoying any visitors you do get from your irrelevant hashtags. That said, if you can find a way to piggyback on a popular hashtag trend, by all means go for it if it truly relates.

2 – Keep the Quantity Low

Don’t overdo your hashtags. There is such a thing as hashtag spam, and although Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags to be used in any caption, the more you use the more desperate you’ll be looking to get exposure for your content. Aim to use just two or three at most hashtags in your captions as a general rule.

3 – Keep Them Short

Too many letters in your hashtags means that no one will be able to read them, let alone it means no one will want to use it. In other words, avoid hashtags like #justhadagreatcheckupwithmydentist.

4 – Keep Them Clever

Branding your own hashtags is a great way to gain notoriety, but remember that a good hashtag isn’t just relevant, it can make someone chuckle and is easy to remember.

5 – Keep a Mix Of Branded and Unbranded Original Tags

Though branded hashtags are great for marketing, if you think of a clever hashtag which doesn’t explicitly relate back to your business, go ahead and use it just the same. If you exclusively go after the branded tags, it’s going to constantly look self-serving, so mix it up.