Finding Your 5 Key Topics / Core Values
How you are going to find relevant hashtags is by using your business's core values. From there you will want to think of things your idea client/audience would search for when looking for you. The idea is to make sure your hashtags wrap up what it is that you do while using keywords that your target audience would look for.
Here is an example of what the 5 Key Topics for a mindfulness coach would be:
. Mindfulness
. Meditation
. Nature
. True joy
. Love
Now, if you were to put a hashtag in front of any of those words, say #love for example, chances are there are millions of posts using those hashtags. You don't want to be using super saturated and popular hashtags. The reason why is because the posts with the most engagement get bumped to the top of the search. So you would be competing with accounts that get thousands of hits of engagement opposed to your 50 likes. Your post will never get seen towards the top.
Try aiming for hashtags that are getting used between 25k-500k. If you are super niched, it's ok to be using hashtags that are lower than that, but try to have several different hashtags all across the board and not just be using hashtags in the 100k zone. Have some really small ones mixed in there too.
Breaking Down Each Key Topic
With your key topics in place, now it's time to narrow it down and find lower used hashtags that your audience are likely to use and search for.
Going back to the mindfulness coach example:
. Mindfulness can be broken down to: #mindfulnesscoach, #mindfulnessmatters, #mindfulnessmoment, #mindfulnesstraining, #mindfulnesscoaching
To find these additional hashtags, if you're not able to come up with them on your own, just search "#mindfulness" in Instagram and you'll be able to see a bunch of different ideas and you'll be able to see which ones fit your business better than others. You can also see how much they've been used. #mindfulnessmeditation has over 640k usages, so now you know to stay away from that one.
Do this exercise over for each of your key topics and it's an easy way to find relevant hashtags that don't have over a millions uses!
Tips for Organizing Your Hashtags
Some planning and auto posting softwares are able to save your hashtags so you don't have to type them in every time you make a post. This makes it super easy and quick to always be posting your hashtags.
For the times you are manually posting, this is what I do. I create a "note" for my hashtags in my Notes App and type them all up in there. When I'm manually posting from my phone, I'll pull up the list in the Notes App, copy the list and paste it in my post.
* Does it matter if hashtags are in the caption or the comment section?
No, it does not matter. Both are attributed to your post and it's only a matter of preference for you.
What do you think, will you be using hashtags? Do you find them practical and useful? Will you use them??
The choice is up to you, but as for me, I am team #hashtags! I am able to reach hundreds of more people because of them.
Take this post for example. Over 90% of the traffic and reach was from hashtags. Go hashtags!