There is an art and a science to choosing the right hashtags for your tweets and your Instagram pictures. Get your hashtags right and you can quickly grow your audience and get hundreds of likes for every single image.
Get them wrong and you can be posting into the void and getting nothing but tumbleweed in return!
So how do you go about using the best hashtags? Let’s take a look!
The Basics
So, the main objective with using your hashtags is to make sure that you post things that people are looking for. At the same time though, it is also very important that you make sure you use tags that aren’t already saturated.
So, for example, let’s imagine that you have a post of the sunset. The temptation here might be to use #sunset. This seems logical because people like sunsets and it will get a lot of searches.
But the problem is that it won’t take long at all until your post is buried. There are so many photos with these hashtags that it will only take minutes for your post to be driven to the bottom of the searches.
To get around this then, you need to post images that have hashtags people are going to want to search for. For instance, this might mean a hashtag like ‘dusk’ or ‘twilight’. Or maybe ‘golden hour’ (a photographic term referring to this kind of light). These terms get searched but they aren’t so common as to face huge amounts of competition.
Other Strategies
When looking for these kinds of terms, you can also think about particular niches, as well as things that are currently in vogue. For example, you should consider posting images and Tweets that respond to what’s currently in the news and what’s currently trending. If a big event happens, this will likely get a lot of searches and you can get in on that action before the market is saturated with related posts.
Another strategy is to think about a particular niche or market. I often post images with the hashtag #laptoplifestyle or #digitalnomad which appeals to a particular type of person.
Finally, consider using hashtags that relate to an event or local news. These will be very popular but the total number of people posting those images will be limited geographically or by attendance. Just been to an Expo? Perfect opportunity for some related Tweets!
