An advanced guide on how to display and choose your hashtags for your Instagram Business page

Instagram is now deeply settled in the Social Media landscape. In 7 years, it has reached 400 million daily active users, 40 billion pictures uploaded, and is expected to generate close to 2 billion ad revenues this year. Furthermore, it will not stop here, Instagram is showing a double-digit growth towards teens and millennials.
Being active on this platform is thus essential to develop a strong brand with a targeted community. To do so, it is highly recommended to use the “hashtags”, a free feature that allows the account to get visibility on selected terms with the same interests. These hashtags have been discussed tons of times and you can find many articles online teaching you how to select them effectively. So, this article will aim at going further by showing you advanced methods.
Hashtag figures
By using using hashtags, your account get further visibility, meaning that it may also get more interactions with the users. To do so, it is required to selected coherent hashtags. Also, besides their relevancy, the number used has a significant influence. According to the Quicksprout’s study, more a picture incorporates hashtags in its description, more it will be likely to get engagement. Figures are clear, pictures having between 11 and 30 hashtags (maximum allowed) get in average 79.5% interaction per 1000 followers while below 11 hashtags would get roughly 35% of interactions.

How to display your list of hashtags
The main issue that comes with these statistics is that a business page that use too many hashtags for their posts does not look very professional but rather money-oriented, which complicates the creation of a real connection between the audience and the brand. Overall it is not recommended to use more than 5 visible hashtags in the description. Fortunately, a trick exists to use them all (up to 30) without harming much the image. In addition, it’s free and easy! Here is a 3-minute video made by Kat Kobzeff or the text instructions below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqyxHzuZEdI
Simply post your hashtags in the comment section using the specific format hereunder. Five dots followed by a line break between each one, after the fifth one comes the hashtags. You should prepare your text in a text editor as using line breaks is not possible directly in the comment section. Bear in mind that you are limited to 30 hashtags per post, description and comment section combined.
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#hashtag1 #hashtag2 #hashtag3 #hashtag4 #hashtag5 #hashtag6 etc
Once done, you will get this “YourID […]” instead of the traditional format that would display the entire text directly to the users. This is thus MUCH cleaner. See the picture below.

How to choose those hashtags?
Now that you know how to display them, it may be good to know how to choose the hashtags for a maximized impact. Here are common principles:
The search :
- Use Instagram’s search function
- Use only hashtags that are relevant to your brand and target audience
Get ideas :
- Check out what hashtags your competitors use
- Check out what hashtags influential people in your industry use
- Use related hashtags
Must do :
- Create your branded hashtag: a specific hashtag that is unique to your brand allowing users to find out more from other users about your products / brand.
Here is another point you think about, should you use popular hashtags that will get buried in a matter of seconds or relatively unpopular hashtags that would get much more exposure over time? To answer this question precisely, we need to know what would be the average percentage of interaction per follower for every hashtag of the platform, which is currently made impossible by Instagram. However, once again we can find an alternative that may satisfy most people. Why not trying to find the right balance? What makes the Instagram’s hashtag feature so different from other platforms is that when clicking on a hashtag, Instagram will show you on top of the page the most popular pictures with those hashtag. This section is called “top post”, which allow thus a picture in this section to stay “on top” much longer than a regular post, getting hundreds or thousands of views that other pictures would not have.

To get in those pools, it is usually the most popular posts that are taken first, but the overall engagement is also considered so smaller accounts have their chances too in case of great content. To get in, here is the process step by step:
Step 1 : Check the number of followers your account has. In this example, we’ll say the account has 3000 followers with in average close to 400 people who get engaged with each post.
Step 2 : Open an excel file and list all the hashtags that would be likely to get used. For each hashtag write also its number of times used.
Step 3 : Keep only those that have been used between 60000 and 90000 times, which is 20 to 30 times 3000, the number of followers of our account. 20x3000 = 60000 / 30x3000 = 90000
Why this? Because from my own experience, posts can get in the “top posts” of hashtags that have a sum 20 to 30 times more important than the number of followers of the selected account. It is purely statistical. If more popular hashtags are used then the chances to get featured decreases drastically while using less popular hashtags would be unproductive, the posts would appear easily but would not get as much interactions as with the optimum ones selected. It is important to keep the list set up in the “step 2” as the chosen hashtags should change frequently according to the development the account.
One last thing, be aware of the infamous “Shadowban”.
If you don’t keep up-to-date frequently you could miss out important things. A recent one was the introduction of the “Shadowban”. This year Instagram has decided to gear up to make its platform cleaner, the result is the restriction of thousands of suspicious accounts. Concretely, for those accounts, they are made invisible in all the hashtag feeds used, however the posts still appear in the feed of the current followers. It results in a decrease of engagement. If it happens to you, it will be very difficult to know if your account is shadowbanned or not as when you would click on one of your hashtag, Instagram made sure that you would still see it. To avoid this unpleasant moment, here are a few rules you should follow, hashtags represent a big part!
1) Avoid third-party services for automations, eg: bots.
Instagram hate accounts that are partly or totally managed by robots. Recently, Instagram won a fight against Instagress, one of the most popular service that allows anyone to automatically like pictures based on the hashtag used, write comments or follow / unfollow people. This was a bombshell in the industry. Every day, Instagram tracks those accounts to close them. That would be a pity if you put much efforts to develop the account with the help of these services to in the end get everything closed ! You can try yourself, the Instagram algorithm is sensitive. Write a sentence, copy-past it on several posts and you’ll quickly see that Instagram will block you momentarily — just a few hours.
2) Avoid restricted or banned hashtags
Yes it exists and that’s probably a good thing as most of restricted hashtags are for obvious reasons. But a few others are more complicated to understand, eg: #Asia. So you’d make sure to make your research on the internet to know further about these hashtags. Here is a link to start:
http://www.bet.com/lifestyle/2017/04/17/here-s-the-full-list-of-hashtags-banned-from-instagram.html
3) Do not always use the same hashtags for months
Instagram consider it as a little spammy since it cannot always be fully tailored for every post.
Now you are ready to grow a great community ! :)