Instagram Hashtag Pyramid

Well researched hashtags included with a caption can drive incredible organic reach on Instagram posts. If you want to get your post in front of people who you don't yet know, take some time out to research your hashtags. When your posts get in front of people organically, if the content is good enough, they may follow you, so this can also help to grow your followers.

It's an easy win and hashtag research has the added benefit of keeping you up to speed with searches and what your competitors are putting out there.

Our advice comes from experience. Consider these two examples of accounts that we manage that use properly researched hashtags. Look at the amount of organic reach they are getting with people who don't follow? 

Impact of Hashtags on Instagram Reach

How Many Hashtags?

An unnamed "Instagram executive" came out in 2021 saying that just 5 hashtags will do. This caused consternation and confusion amongst everyone close to Instagram because we all know that using the full quota of 30 brings results. Why would we switch it down to just 5 - especially as the numbers on the platform keep growing? If more people are there, you need all 30 little rockets to propel your content.

Our advice remains the same –aim for 30 hashtags per post - and the best way to do this is to research them beforehand.  Do the research, save your hashtags by content pillar or theme. The really good scheduling tools will let you store your hashtags in blocks. That's what we do. It makes it easy when you're posting to click the little icon and add your researched hashtags into captions for grid or Reels.

Follow the advice in the video below, or just scroll back up to our hashtag pyramid, and discover yours now.  If there's one thing you never do again, it's inventing generic hashtags on the fly as you write your post. Promise?