How to Find Hashtags for Instagram
Recently on our YouTube channel, we were asked how to find hashtags for Instagram. Luckily, I had just created a method that has been working great for my animated series, BitBoy & Hodl. I began my Instagram account for this project only 5 weeks ago & we are already at 1500 followers. None of these followers are fake & we have been getting a ton of engagement on our account. This engagement has now started to roll into engagement on Twitter & our website. This has been very exciting and people have been wondering how we have been able to grow so fast.
We have been able to grow so fast due to two things. First, we create engaging content. On our Instagram page, we make memes & video memes. We do not steal our content from other pages or sites. My business partner and myself brainstorm to come up with original meme ideas. We brand each one of our memes with a logo watermark & our username also. Our memes are a cut above the ones you see that were made with a meme generator on an iPhone. We are active on Instagram and engage with anyone who comments on our posts.
Second, we use the right hashtags for our posts. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the analytics for our accounts and I have discovered something that I did not ever think about before. Over half of our Likes on each post, come from people who do not follow our page. These people are finding our posts because of our hashtags. They are either searching the hashtags directly or they are simply going to their search page on Instagram where it will show them our memes because they follow similar accounts.
Process for Finding Hashtags on Instagram
After searching all over the interwebs for a hashtag solution, I realized that I was going to have to find them myself. I tried reaching out to a social media consultant, using a paid service, & I even tried asking people I knew. None of them seemed to have the right solution for me. One of the reasons I had a hard time getting help because my niche (cryptocurrency) is very new on Instagram. And my even narrower niche (crypto humor) is so specific that generalized hashtags do not work for me. I wasn’t sure how to find hashtags for instagram that would work for my niche.
Luckily, I kept working until I found a solution that works. The first thing you need to do is find at least 3 hashtags you think you will use. The narrower the better. For instance, if you are selling antique lamps, do not use the hashtags #antiques. It is too general for our purposes. However, #AntiqueLamps would work perfectly. After you thought of 3 hashtags, use the Instagram search function & input your first hashtag. Then copy all of the hashtags for the top 9 posts that come up. Don’t worry about if the hashtags overlap or don’t have many hashtags. Just copy them and put them on a notepad or somewhere else on your desktop. After you have done this for 27 total posts (top 9 posts for each of your 3 chosen hashtags), you should have a huge list.
Creating List of Hashtags
Now take that list & separate them by line so each hashtag is on its own line. This is super important. It may take some time, but it is pivotal. Take your separated list to this Duplicate Line Deleter, & delete the duplicate lines. Now none of the hashtags are listed twice and it is a completely independent list of hashtags.
After this is done, save your list onto a Notepad on your computer or somewhere else where you can easily get to it. Now take your list to RandomizeList.com. Put your hashtags in and hit “Submit.” And just like that, you have a randomized list of relevant hashtags. For Instagram, you can use a total of 30 hashtags per post so copy the first 30 hashtags on your random list and put them in your post.
The last step is to take your 30 hashtags to this Duplicate Word Deleter (seen below). This will take your vertical list of hashtags and turn it into a blurb of hashtags that is more suitable for Instagram.
One quick note on using different hashtags every time. If you use the exact same list of 30 hashtags on every post, eventually Instagram will do what is called “shadow blocking”. They will penalize your posts and consider them spam if you use the same hashtags over and over again. Shadow blocking prevents users who do not follow you from seeing your posts. This can set you back many months. However, if you have a list of a couple hundred hashtags, constantly randomizing your list and only using the top 30 hashtags the list will prevent getting shadow blocked.
Thanks for reading and don’t forget to watch our “How to Find Hashtags for Instagram” video!
