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If you are an entrepreneur and Instagram is not just a place for entertainment for you, but a platform for acquiring customers, you want to attract as many potential customers as possible to your page. You spend a lot of time and money creating visual content, photographing the product from different angles, and shooting engaging videos. Also, you are most likely trying to write sales texts that will induce your readers to want your product. And of course, you are using paid ads. Oh, this paid advertising! Everyone knows that if your targeting isn’t right, you can waste hundreds or even thousands of dollars without getting a result. If you are a beginner entrepreneur and do not have a large marketing budget, you must be questioning yourself: are there still free and effective ways to promote your business on Instagram in 2022?
Hashtags – your gateway to free promotion on Instagram
So, the only way to promote your Instagram page for free this year and next is with hashtags. Everything else costs money, and not small ones. Marketing experts argue that if you choose the right hashtags, you can increase your reach tenfold. But where can one find hashtags for Instagram? People used to collect them manually by looking at competitors’ posts and copying hashtags from them. But glory to technical progress! Now there are modern AI-based automation tools that help generate hashtags for likes in a few seconds (Example, Inflict).
Some of the benefits of hashtags include:
- They are free
- Hashtags help attract new customers
- Tags bring your posts to the top
- They are seen even by those who do not follow you
- You can benefit from them for a long time
The more subscribers react to your publications, the higher the engagement rate. This signals to Instagram algorithms that your posts are of high quality and interesting. Accordingly, Instagram can bring you to the top in the feed and you can even get into recommendations.
10 golden hashtag rules
For hashtags to be useful, you need to follow a few simple rules.
- Use hashtags only if you have an open account.
- Do not add more than 30 hashtags to one post.
- Use up to 10 hashtags per story.
- You can add hashtags to the post text or leave them in the first comment.
- Find relevant hashtags that match the topic of your post.
- Look for new hashtags every time, do not copy-paste the same.
- Follow the trends and choose the latest trendy hashtags.
- Use a mix of high-frequency, mid-range, and low-frequency hashtags for your post.
- Track statistics in the first day after, a week, and a month after the post were released.
- Make a list of hashtags ahead of time as soon as you have a content plan.
Why do you need to follow these rules? If you are smart about using hashtags, Instagram algorithms will understand that you are not a robot or a spammer. Common mistake newbies make is to copy the same hashtags in every post and publish a lot of hashtags. Some people post up to 100 pieces in one post. But a large quantity does not always lead to quality. Unfortunately, organic reach is dropping as well as user engagement. As a result, such posts are not shown in the Feed.
Ways to use hashtags
So, you already know that you can use hashtags both in posts and stories. Let’s take a closer look at how to do this. If you’re posting creative stories, don’t clutter up your screen with ten hashtags at once. It will look unaesthetic. Select the sticker icon and enter the text of one hashtag. You can write another 10 in plain text. To make your Stories look less cluttered, you can reduce the font size or cover the hashtags with some kind of objects, such as stickers, captions, or polls.
As for the posts, it doesn’t matter where you put hashtags. You can publish 10-30 hashtags at once at the end of the post, or evenly distribute them throughout the text if appropriate. Please note that Instagram has a limit on the size of the text – this is 2200 characters including spaces. If your text is too long, you can put hashtags in the first comment. Ideally, post your comments in the first few seconds after the post came out. This will help maximize your post’s reach.
You can also use hashtags in your profile header. For example, if you have an online store and you are organizing a sale for Black Friday or Christmas, add in the appropriate tag, so customers can quickly navigate to the products. If you’re a content writer, readers can quickly navigate your blog.
If you use branded hashtags, periodically remind readers of this. Once every few months, you can publish a post that will collect all your hashtags. So your old and new subscribers will be able to follow the hashtag and subscribe to those publications that are of interest to them or immediately read all posts on one topic.
So in 2022, hashtags are still relevant tools for your online marketing. Do not forget them when you write your next post or publish a Story. Who knows, maybe hashtags will bring new customers to you?
Thank you for reading!