Nowadays most of the population is super active on Instagram and trying to build their network as large as possible. How do you expect yourself to extend your reach or keep your audience engaged? Obviously by posting unique and good content, right? But content only helps after your profile reaches maximum people. If it doesn’t reach out to people, there will be no one to utilize that content. So, all of us have our focus on extending our reach.
How does someone do that? How do you make your post more reachable and engaging? Hashtags. Here comes the use of hashtags which is still one of the most effective and popular ways to get more engagement on Instagram in 2022.
Now comes the most important question. How does one effectively use hashtags? How does it work? Which one is trending now? What hashtags are suitable to go in your caption? So many questions and one brain struggling with everything. But don’t worry because in this article we will educate you about the hashtags from its working to its benefits.
How do hashtags work on Instagram?
While some people may think that use of hashtags to extend your audience reach is just a myth, it is actually a way to label your profile or post which helps Instagram serve relevant posts to its customers as per their preferred categories.
So yes, it’s true that Hashtags have their own uses and benefits. You can simply understand a hashtag as an Instagram algorithm to categorize your content and suggest it to the users who are highly interested in such content. So, basically it’s a tool to get more engagement while for a user it defines what type of content he wants to watch.
Do Instagram Hashtags actually work, especially in 2022?
So many people doubt if hashtags work. As time is passing by, people are getting convinced that Hashtags do nothing on Instagram. But it’s not true at all. Hashtags work as the medium to categorise the content for Instagram users.
Instagram’s latest recommendation suggests that one should use only 3-5 hashtags. What’s the reason behind this statement? As you may already know that by clicking on Instagram Hashtag, a long list of accounts get opened. So, a Hashtag makes you get into the list and make your content more reachable by increasing its discoverability. If you use a hashtag in the caption of your post, your post becomes searchable too. 
Top 30 most used popular Hashtags on Instagram in 2022
You must have heard that trending is what tops the search list. One after one, something or some hashtag is always trending on Instagram such as #metoomovement. This is an incredibly effective way to get your content in top searches. Do without any delay let’s take a look at the most popular Instagram hashtags in 2022.
- #love
- #instahood
- #design
- #art
- #fashion
- #summer
- #inspiration
- #summer
- #foodie
- #smallbusiness
- #homedecor
- #beauty
- #lifestyle
- #home
- #selfcare
- #photography
- #ootd
- #photooftheday
- #skincare
- #selflove
- #architecture
- #luxury
- #instafood
- #mentalhealth
- #vegan
- #mindset
- #shopsmall
- #linkinbio
- #interiors
- #delicious
- #realtor
- #entrepreneur
How many Hashtags to use on your post?
You must have seen a lot of posts in captions of which you find a lot of hashtags touching the count of hundred sometimes. On the other hand, you can have some posts in captions of which you will rarely find more than 10 hashtags. Why such a huge difference? Isn’t it confusing? What is an ideal number of hashtags one should put on a post?
As we already mentioned, Instagram recommends to use only 3-5 hashtags on a single post despite of putting a countless Hashtags. It might sound contrasting to what we have always heard about using hashtags which says that the more Hashtags you use in a post, the more audience it reaches. But in this new era of SEO where everyone is focused on keywords, it actually makes sense.
Now when Instagram suggests to us what we like or what we want to watch, content has to be a good match to the Hashtag. As we told you that Instagram uses hashtags to categorise or label your content and put it in someone’s feed with the same interest. So,it has become much more important to use less but right SEO or keyword Focused hashtags which actually define the genre of your content. It will make it easier for Instagram to accurately suggest your content to the relevant user. The fewer hashtags you use, the more accuracy is detected by Instagram.
In order to prove this theory, a bunch of surveys have been conducted. During a survey, 18+ millions Instagram feed posts were kept under observation and the number of hashtags used per post with average reach was compared.
So, what we observed is that the more hashtags you use the more audience it reaches out. Reach rate went up to 11% (24 to 35), as the number of hashtags grew in a post.
To put it in numbers, if someone had 20k followers, an additional number of 2.2k accounts reach his per post. This is what came out as the result of observation.
And if we compare the trends of 2020 to that of 2021, we do not exactly notice a change. The results are quite consistent.
So how many hashtags should you put on your Instagram post? Well, just as before, the more hashtags you add, the higher its reach. Traditional method wins over in this one. Currently it’s still one of the best strategies to extend your content reach. But if Instagram keeps introducing more suggested tabs, then it might be better to focus on fewer but accurate hashtags defining your content. 
Types of Hashtags you can use
There is not a particular type of hashtag that we can use. There are different types of hashtags on Instagram that you can use to enhance your post’s reach and productivity. Majorly, you will find five types of hashtags which is following:
1. Location Based
The first type of hashtag is location based which means that it would indicate the location from where the post belongs. For instance, #dillihaat #gatewayofIndia #Hauzkhas. These are some of the best examples to describe what location based hashtags refer to.
2. Branded
Another category of Hashtags is related to brands, companies or events. For example, if you’re organising a campaign or hosting an event, you can you the Hashtags like #girlup or #educatechildren. While on the other hand, you can you hashtags like #lifeboy, #later or #latercon.
3. Your Niche Based
If you’re a professional, involved in a particular niche or your content belongs to one, you can use hashtags describing your niche. For instance, if you are a fashion influencer, you can use #fashionista or #stylish and if you’re a wedding planner, you can use #weddingplanning.
4. Community Building Hashtags
These types of hashtags help you build a network which is majorly your community. Community based hashtags like #weworshipnature help you to gather the support of a community.
5. Descriptive Hashtags
Apart from all the indirect indicating hashtags, descriptive Hashtags are the ones which describe the content category of your actual post. Take #Woodwickcandles for example or #poetry. If you run a business of your own, use hashtags accordingly.
Benefits of using Instagram Hashtags
Nothing is useless. Everything has their own benefits in some way. Using Instagram Hashtags also benefits us. One of the most popular benefits that you must be familiar with is that it makes your content more discoverable. The more hashtags you use, the most accessible your content becomes. It gets easier for you to be discovered by a new audience.
But only using the right hashtags will help you reach your target audience. It gets you more engagement, more followers and more awareness about your brand or profile.
Other than just enhancing the probability of you getting discovered by more and more audience, using Instagram Hashtags also benefit you in a lot of different ways such as community building, spreading awareness about a campaign, etc. Hashtags help you reach the target audience you want and research for your audience. In simple words, your hashtags define you, your content and your personality. This is why it’s really important to have a clear and well thought hashtag. As they are getting more and more based on SEO and keywords, it’s become really necessary to be cautious while choosing a hashtag for your post.
How to find Trending Hashtags on Instagram?
As I already mentioned above, using trending hashtags can help you get a higher engagement rate. And as many Hashtags you use, the chances of an improved engagement rate also increases. Recent reports have suggested this despite Instagram’s official recommendation for using 3-5 hashtags only.
Remember, trending is not enough relevance is also equally important. So, how do you find the relevant trending hashtags for your Instagram post? This is where people get stuck. We’ll explain to you three easy and smart tactics to find the most relevant trending hashtags.
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Online Instagram Hashtag Suggestions Tools
Nowadays, the internet is the solution to every problem. Apps are getting launched day by day to solve our daily life crisis. Finding relevant Instagram hashtags has also become one of them. In response to this difficulty, some online Instagram hashtag suggestion tools have come into existence. You can use them to find relevant trending hashtags for your post.
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Explore the Instagram Explore Page
Research can get you answers to any question if you try hard. Well, Instagram is something related to smart work so it has a feature called explore page. When you go there, you can find anything by searching. It might be a great source of inspiration for your Instagram post. To get better results, search for the keywords related to your content and observe the top results.
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Consider Hashtag Volume
You must have seen that when you search for a hashtag in Instagram explore page, you also get the number of posts in which the tag has already been used. So, if you use a tag of volume ranging from 1-10 million, there’s chances of your post getting lost among that crowd of content. And if you use hashtags with a volume of hundreds only, it means people are not searching for that tag much in the explore page. This is why you should try to use hashtags with a volume ranging from 10k-200k posts.
Should you use hashtags in the caption or comment section?
This is a very common question which comes to many people’s minds. They are confused whether they should use hashtags in the caption or comment section to get more benefits.
First of all, Instagram has already clarified that putting hashtags in both caption and comment section benefit you equally. It’s not mandatory to use them in a particular segment or another one. It’s completely up to you and it’s your choice. But yes, it is worth considering timeliness though. If you choose to use hashtags in the comment section, you have to do this as soon as your post is published on Instagram. While there’s no such drawback to caption.
Can Hashtags also increase likes? How?
Use of 20-30 hashtags for a single Instagram post doesn’t just increase your followers or reach but also buys you a good engagement rate. Use of relevant hashtags as per your niche helps you get a new audience which just doesn’t follow you but also interacts with your content. And this leads to a blast of likes to your post. Indirectly, hashtags just are not a way to reach out to a large audience but also the right audience.
It’s necessary to make it obvious that you use the relevant hashtags consisting of all the properties mentioned above. It helps your post to show up in top search results. And most importantly, it gets you an engaging audience which is much better than having a million uninteractive audience.
How to save time with Hashtags?
Obviously, searching and putting 20-30 hashtags for each of your posts is a time consuming task. Not everyone can have enough time to spare. How do we save time with Hashtags? What you can do is make a common list of 20-30 hashtags that usually match with your content. Now customise or edit the list as per the core message of your each post. You can add, delete or replace those tags with the relevant ones as per your convenience. It will save you a lot of time as you don’t have to go to a search bar every time and look for 20-30 trending and relevant hashtags every time you post something.
How to build hashtag strategy with Analytics?
If you are looking for a continuous uninterrupted flow of engagement rate on Instagram, you have to build your own hashtag strategy. For instance, what hashtags actually work for you? What hashtags are more likely to benefit you in terms of engagement and follower count?
Till now, you must have got it clear that hashtags play a major role in getting your profile to be in top search results and engagement rate. But hashtags are of no use if they are not efficient for you. You should make sure that the hashtag you use is relevant. How can you do this?
You can not just move your wand and know what hashtag works for you. You have to analyse their efficiency rate. How does one do that? There are some hashtag analytical tools which tell you whether the Hashtags are working for you or not. You have to maintain consistency in order to make an analytical strategy. You post regularly, analyse and make changes to get better results.
