Hashtags Nobody Searches

The block at the bottom of every post

A photograph of a finished bouquet, a caption of one line, and beneath it thirty hashtags: #love, #instagood, #flowers, #beautiful, #photooftheday, and twenty-five more.

The same block, pasted from a note on the phone, goes under every post.

Instagram allows up to thirty hashtags on a post, and many businesses use all of them, on the theory that more tags means more people.

Most of those tags reach nobody who will ever buy anything, and the block makes every caption look like an advertisement.

Why the biggest tags do nothing

A tag like #love carries an enormous number of posts. A new post appears at the top of its recent list and is buried within seconds.

The top posts shown on those pages tend to come from accounts with large followings and quick early engagement, which a local business post rarely has.

And the people browsing them, if anyone is, are not in your town and not looking for what you sell.

Tags that reach nobody

• Giant tags where a post is buried in seconds.
• Invented tags that nobody else has ever used.
• Tags for places you do not serve.
• Tags restricted by Instagram after misuse.
• The same block pasted under every post.

The fourth is the one nobody notices. Instagram limits some tags that have been flooded with spam, and a block copied from a list online can include one without anyone knowing.

The tags local customers use

The useful tags are the ones real people near you post under and browse: the town, the neighbourhood, a local event, a local interest.

In BC, many people tag places by their airport code: #yvr for Vancouver, #yyj for Victoria, #ylw for Kelowna. These carry a steady stream of local posts.

Neighbourhood names, landmarks and seasonal events work the same way, on a smaller and more local scale.

Add one or two tags that describe the thing itself in the words a customer would use, such as #peonies in season, rather than a generic word like #flowers.

The same applies in Stories. A hashtag or location added to a story can put it alongside other stories with that tag or place, another way into the same local pages.

How to check a tag

Before using a tag, search for it in Instagram and look at the recent posts, not the number at the top.

Look for three things: posts from people in your area, posts from the last few hours or days, and accounts that look like your customers rather than other businesses.

A tag full of businesses advertising to each other reaches nobody. A tag full of residents' photographs of their own streets is the one you want.

Since December, people can also follow a hashtag, so a good local tag can put your post in front of people who chose to see that tag.

How many is enough

There is no magic number. A handful of well-chosen tags, often three to eight, covers most posts.

Change them with the post. A wedding bouquet, a workshop announcement and a photograph of the shop at Christmas call for different tags.

Put the tags after the caption, not before it. The feed shows only the first lines of a caption, and those should be about the post.

Write tags made of several words with a capital at the start of each, such as #MothersDayVictoria, so they are easier to read and screen readers can pronounce them.

A worked example

A small florist in a Victoria neighbourhood posted every day and pasted the same thirty hashtags under each photograph.

With Mother's Day approaching, the owner looked at who was liking and commenting. Most of it came from accounts in other countries and from other florists.

The tags were reaching people who collect likes, not people who might send flowers to a mother across town.

The block was replaced with five to seven tags chosen for each post: #yyj, the neighbourhood, the Saturday market where the shop has a stall, and one or two describing the flowers.

For Mother's Day, the posts added a tag local residents were already using for the occasion, found by reading its recent posts first.

Fewer tags, each one chosen for the people behind it.

A branded tag only if people will use it

Many businesses invent a tag for themselves, usually their name with a word attached, and wait for customers to use it.

Customers use a branded tag when they have a reason to: a festival, a race, a contest, a place they want to be seen at.

A plumber's branded tag will never catch on. A tag for an annual event you run might, because people want their photographs to be part of it.

If you do run an event, put its tag on the poster, the tickets and the venue itself. People use the tag they can see.

Customers who want to show your business can tag your account and your location instead, which works without inventing anything.

Hashtags elsewhere

On Twitter, one or two relevant tags are plenty, and a tag for a local event can put a post in front of people following it.

On Facebook, hashtags do little for a business page. On every platform, a caption written for people does more than a list of tags written for a search.

The counter-case

Hashtags are a small lever, and they cannot rescue a dull photograph.

A business whose customers come almost entirely from referrals and repeat visits may find that even good tags change little, and that the time is better spent on the photographs and the profile.

Some broad tags do have real communities behind them, such as a craft or a hobby, and one of those can be worth including if your customers belong to it.

For most local businesses the advice holds: a few tags that local people use, checked first, and no pasted block.

Before the next post

1. Delete the pasted block from your notes.
2. Search your town's tags in Instagram.
3. Read the recent posts under each.
4. Keep the ones local people use.
5. Choose tags for each post separately.
6. Capitalise each word in longer tags.
7. Skip a branded tag unless people will use it.

Step three is the one that decides everything else. The number on a tag says how many posts it has; the recent posts say who is actually there.

Making the profile those tags lead to worth a visit is covered in Instagram business profiles and the contact button.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.