Why You Can't Live Without Hashtags

I think I just about have figured out Instagram. I love it and am meeting so many wonderful people. It's hard to imagine that I didn't know any of my 8342 friends less than two months ago. That is just crazy!

So what have I learned since the last time I posted about @my100yearoldhome? Hashtags are becoming more important. You are limited as to the number of hashtags you can have on a post. You can't include more than 30 hashtags in a single comment. (And keep in mind that you can't include more than 5 @ mentions in a single comment.)

The first step to using hashtags to grow your audience is to understand the way they work within Instagram. When you go into the search feature of Instagram, you’ll notice you can search by top content, hashtag, people (username) and places. Instagram uses hashtags to categorize content. A great analogy is to think of how you would organize paperwork in an office. You have your papers which go inside folders, and the folders go inside a filing cabinet. In this scenario, the papers are Instagram posts, the folders are hashtags and the filing cabinet is the Instagram platform.

When someone searches #apples, it’s like telling Instagram to search its cabinet for the “apples” folder and show the latest posts containing that keyword. When you use hashtags in your posts, you’re letting Instagram know to put your post in the appropriate folder in case anyone searches for it.


What this means for your art business is that you need to get into the habit of using hashtags for any main keywords you mention inside of your posts. Using keywords without a hashtag won’t make your post discoverable. So it makes no sense!

There are some really good resources if you want to learn more about hashtags. Hootsuite has a great site they put together called The Complete Instagram Hashtag Guide for Business. 

Tomorrow we will talk about how you can use hashtags for Instagram to grow your audience and build your brand.