Instagram can be used by individuals or companies for marketing. You can promote yourself, your business, your products or your services and could gain thousands of followers if you know how. Part of that is the hashtag. I shall show you how they work and list some of the most popular Instagram hashtags you can use to promote yourself.
Instagram is a great social network that seems to be growing all the time. From a relative nobody to a network with several hundred million users, it is another great way to lose hours of each day.
How Instagram hashtags work
Instagram hashtags work in a similar way as they do on Twitter. They are a way of categorizing the post and act as a way for people to search and your post to appear in that search. The hashtag (#) is used extensively in social media and play a vital role here too.
A hashtag can help your post appear in popular searches. Place a popular hashtag on your post and it will appear whenever someone search for that term. Carefully selected hashtags increase the chances of that post appearing in the search and perhaps higher up the search.
The more your post appears, the more likely it is that your post will be read, your message communicated and yourself or your business promoted.
Instagram has a limit of 30 hashtags per post which gives you a lot of scope to develop them and include the most popular. Any hashtag you use has to be relevant and not mislead the viewer. Not because of any rules but because if you mislead a person once, they will not trust you again. So while including popular hashtags is vitally important, including relevant popular hashtags is the only way to achieve your goals of getting more views or followers.
How to generate popular Instagram hashtags
There are a few online tools that makes it easy to create popular Instagram hashtags. You can come up with them yourself, but these web tools are faster.
Tagblender
Tagblender is a very useful website designed around Instagram. Select the words that best describe your post and add them to the blender. Click a word in the left menu, select the +10 or +30 to add them to the blender. Do this until the maximum of 30 has been reached. Then copy and paste them into your post. Easy!
HashtagsForLikes
HashtagsForLikes does much the same thing. It categorizes hashtags into various groups such as most popular, second and third most popular and then genre. Currently the most popular Instagram hashtags according to HashtagsForLikes are:
#love #followback #instagramers #socialenvy #PleaseForgiveMe #tweegram #photooftheday #20likes #amazing #smile #follow4follow #like4like #look #instalike #igers #picoftheday #food #instadaily #instafollow #followme #girl #instagood #bestoftheday #instacool #socialenvyco #follow #colorful #style #swag.
Instagram Tags
If you are promoting a business or product, you may like Instagram Tags. This uses the same premise as above but has a more product-centric view of categories and tags. It will work for personal promotion too, but is more geared towards businesses.
Popular Instagram hashtags as of September 2017
As you can imagine, in an environment as dynamic as social media, popular Instagram hashtags will be changing all the time. If you want the very latest tags, use one of the tools above. Currently, the most popular Instagram hashtags are:
#love, #instagood, #photooftheday, #beautiful, #fashion, #tbt, #happy, #cute, #followme, #like4like, #follow, #me, #picoftheday, #selfie, #instadaily, #summer, #friends, #art, #girl, #repost, #fun, #smile, #nature, #instalike, #style, #food, #family, #tagsforlikes, #likeforlike, #igers, #fitness, #follow4follow, #nofilter, #instamood, #travel, #amazing, #life, #beauty, #vscocam, #sun.
Those are the general popular tags and some or many of them will not be relevant to your post. Many are included in that HashtagsForLikes list but some are different. As the golden rule is to always be relevant, you will need to select those that work and generate more to fill in the gaps of those that don’t.
It isn’t all about the hashtag
Social media isn’t all about posting things to make people follow you. It is an engagement with your audience, a two-way conversation. Don’t just post and forget, post and engage with followers. Answer questions, offer advice, let people into your life as far as you’re comfortable. Hashtags are just the means of getting attention, it is then up to you to keep it.
If you’re stuck for inspiration for popular Instagram hashtags and need a little help, use the sites above or look at your competition. A little competitor analysis is an important part of marketing and can show you a few more hashtags that you could use. Don’t copy them all as you’re just going head to head with that post. Instead, use them as inspiration to go one better.
Got any other ways to generate popular Instagram hashtags? Tell us about them below if you do!
