Using Hashtags To Create Successful Instagram Videos For Your Business
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Using hashtags is a great way to increase your engagement on Instagram, especially if you’re using a business account. Before creating content, there are a few things you can do to help with its success rate, and using hashtags is one of them. By adding hashtags that are related to your niche, you can increase the likelihood of your videos being seen by more people. Different social media platforms will reward their users for taking advantage of new features by pushing their content in front of more people. Since videos like Instagram Reels, IGTV, etc., are rather new features, people who regularly use them are more likely to have their content pushed to the Explore Page than those who don’t. But how do you find these hashtags, and how can you know which ones are best for you to use?
Hashtag Research
Doing hashtag research is very important to the creation of your content. Not only do hashtags help with the ranking of your videos once complete, but they can also be useful in developing your content.
Searching words in the hashtags section of Instagram and scrolling through relevant tags is the first step within this process. From here, you can click on each one and see the related videos. You can often look through other videos, hashtags, etc., to brainstorm ideas of your own. Now, this isn’t to say you should be using this section of Instagram to take other people’s content but rather to become inspired by it.
Once you have searched up the relevant words that come to mind, we recommend you open up the notes app on your phone. Write down all of the related hashtags within your notes, along with their search results.
This will help you decide which ones you can use moving forward based on their search volume. You will want to have a combination of high, medium and low competition. This is an essential step for many reasons, and you ultimately want to ensure that you aren’t trying to rank for hashtags that only have millions of search results. Although a few of them might, it’s best to keep track of the results of each hashtag during this research stage to know what the best combination of tags would be to use.
Trending Hashtags
When it comes to finding hashtags for videos, you always want to ensure they’re already being used in Reels. So, when you go to the hashtag part of Instagram, a Reel should be the first thing that comes up after searching a word. Here are some examples of what we mean by that.
As you can see, after searching something like “business tips” or “digital marketing tips,” the first search result on the far-left side is an Instagram Reel. If you click on the video in this section of your search results, you can then scroll through all of the highest-performing reels that have used that hashtag. Once again, you can use other videos to see what’s working to create your own content.
We recommend going through the top video for that search and looking at the other tags they have used before creating a Reel or any other Instagram video content. Then, dig a little deeper into these hashtags to see the search results and the type of content made around them. Then, you will want to open up your notes app once again and write down the top 5 to 10 hashtags from that video that you think could work for you. Next, look through at least 5 more Reels within that original hashtag to see if they’re using similar hashtags to the first video. Continue these same steps with each video you look through within your various searches!
This is one way to see if there is a common theme in how the hashtags are used and an easy way to find relevant tags.
How Many Hashtags Should You Be Using?
It seems like what Instagram recommends for hashtags is constantly changing. In the past, they recommended using all 30 hashtags. However, it seemed that many people were using hashtags irrelevant to their topic, content, or niche simply to reach that number. It’s kind of like when you’re trying to write an essay in school and you use fillers to reach the word count.
Regardless, Instagram didn’t like how inconsistent the content was within their tags because it was confusing to the algorithm. This is why they now recommend using only 8-12 instead. However, we believe that you need to find what works best for you. Sometimes, that will be 5 – 10 hashtags in a post. Other times, it might be 15-20. Since it isn’t always the easiest to keep on top of the changing rules or expectations on the various social media platforms, we recommend following your own rules instead. Now, this isn’t to suggest throwing caution to the wind and putting 30 tags on your posts that don’t make any sense to your content. However, if, through your research, you’re able to find more than 10 hashtags that are relevant to your niche or the content you’re posting, then that’s how many you should include.
Our Tips/ Recommendations
When determining which hashtags you want to use, we suggest a combination of ones with high, medium and low competition. It’s best not to try your luck at only hashtags with millions of results, but you also don’t want to try out ones that only have, say, 100. And speaking of low search results, we recommend not trying to come up with your own original hashtags because trying to get your business name trending as a tag will rarely work unless it’s already extremely well known. Therefore, it’s best to stick with using what’s already being searched and creating your content from there.
Our last tip for creating these videos through hashtags and research is following Instagram creator’s pages. As a content creator, you can learn a great deal from staying informed and learning all of the tips and tricks straight from the source. By seeing what’s trending on there, you might just come up with an idea for a future trending Reel of your own!
Conclusion
Although Instagram Reels and IGTV are somewhat of a newer concept, we’ve already seen the influence that hashtags have on the success of someone’s content. This is why it’s important to be informed on how hashtags work before you begin creating!
To learn more about how to optimize your social media and online platforms, download the complete social media marketing e-book for businesses.
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