It’s nearly 2023, and hashtags are still useful when it comes to Instagram promotion and discoverability. There’s hardly anyone who doesn’t know what a hashtag is; however, many marketers don’t utilise them since they believe this way of Instagram promotion no longer works.
In this piece, we’ll reveal several cases when you shouldn’t disregard the power of hashtags even if you don’t use them on a regular basis in your content and will share best practices for developing a proper hashtag strategy in 2023 and beyond.
Giveaway
The first scenario when you should include a hashtag in your post is a giveaway. If you want to run a contest among your followers or involve them in a challenge, it’s better to come up with a specific hashtag for this particular activity. This will help you analyse the results more efficiently, track the participants with no need to check the Tagged tab all the time and distinguish the participants from those who just randomly tagged you.
Besides, a hashtag dedicated to a giveaway allows your audience to see what other participants do, comment on their content, follow each other, and thus, build a community.
💡Add a hashtag to your caption, not the first comment, to gain maximum engagement and exposure.
Product or Campaign Launch
When you launch a new product, service, marketing campaign, or collaboration with an influencer or brand, you surely want as many people to know about it as possible. Apart from other promotion ways, such as targeted ads, regular content posting, being active with Reels and stories, you can create a hashtag particularly for this campaign and post everything with this hashtag.
This will help your audience easily navigate through the content and discover these posts if they’re interested in the campaign. This will be of great help for you as well since it allows you to find posts quickly and track their performance separately from other content.
Promotion & Sale
This is similar to the previous point: When launching a Halloween, Black Friday or Christmas sale, make a hashtag dedicated to the content focused on this deal. Your audience will then easily find those posts with the discounts and sale information, thus not bombarding your DMs with the same questions.
Don’t forget to add this hashtag to your bio, so that everyone who visits your profile can see you’ve launched an offer.
💡Find popular hashtags related to your brand right on Instagram or in specialised search tools for Instagram, such as Combin Growth. The great thing about Combin Growth is that you can combine several hashtags to find content tagged with them and see which hashtags are used by your competitors.
Simply start entering a hashtag, see how many results it’ll generate and add a few more to discover content relevant to your account.
Social Media Activism
If you use your brand profile not just to sell products but also to express your position on things and leverage it as an activism platform, you already know how much hashtags mean when it comes to social media activism.
Add a hashtag that reflects your current opinion in your posts and stories to get discovered by people who share your views.
💡Write all words in a hashtag with a capital letter. Thus you'll make it more accessible for screen readers.
Content Navigator
If your brand Instagram page is full of valuable posts with recommendations, advice, tutorials, and customer stories, help your followers navigate through the content and easily get what they’re searching for anytime they visit your page.
Tag each of your content types with a certain hashtag and create a list of them in your pinned posts or Highlights to let people know which hashtags to use. Thus, if people turn to your page when looking for something they've seen there, they will quickly find the post.
💡Create a list of such hashtags to never forget which ones to use. You can keep this list in Combin Scheduler, a free Instagram planning tool. The software allows you to manage your hashtags in templates and insert them in captions when you plan your feed posts for publication that appear right when your post does.
With Combin Scheduler, you can plan posts, stories, reposts, add a link in bio that shows there right when the post goes live, and many more! The tool is absolutely free with no hidden fees or trial periods.
UGC & Community Building
To harvest user-generated content and build a community around your brand, come up with a brand hashtag that is unique to your company. Add it to your bio and ask your followers to tag you with this hashtag each time they create content mentioning you. This will allow you to build your brand fam and have a never-ending source of trustworthy content you can leverage in your marketing strategy.
Try the Combin solutions for free to enhance your Instagram marketing 👇