How to Start Your Hashtag Research and Improve Your Strategy

The best way to start any strategy is by asking yourself what you want to achieve. Why do you want to improve your hashtag strategy? Is it to:

It’s important to take note and keep your goals top of mind. That way, when you are working on your strategy, and implementing it into your routine, you don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. A lot of people find it easier when they can tick off certain milestones as they go – so you can also set micro goals to track your progress along the way. This will help you stay motivated, and will show you that your strategy is paying off, in real-time. Here are some examples of micro goals you can set yourself:

As you can see, your micro goals can relate to your learning in any way. Not only does it make the task at hand a lot less daunting, but it also helps you understand exactly what it is you want to achieve, and how you’re going to get there. We suggest keeping your goals to hand, whether on your desktop, notes or a piece of paper on your desk.

Something that we like to reiterate a lot, is that your hashtag strategy and that all-important performance – is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no shortcuts when it comes to gaining organic growth on Instagram, so it is essential that you put the time and effort into getting your strategy where it needs to be, before you start posting.

Whether you are fitting the course into a busy work schedule, or you have time to spare, it’s important to set and dedicate time to both your learnings and your research. This will make you feel more structured when you sit down and start learning, and will also ensure that you are spending enough time on building out the foundations of your research. Depending on how quickly or slowly you like to work, set a time that is right for you every day, that you can dedicate to improving and learning all there is to know about hashtags.

A lot of people can be metric-phobic. What do we mean by this? There are a lot of creators and accounts out there that prefer to focus on being creative and sending their content out into the world without paying attention to or monitoring metrics. When it comes to hashtag research however, metrics are your best friend, and we will touch a lot on how they can help you really improve your reach.

Even if you aren’t analytical in your normal strategy, it’s easy to get to grips with what we will teach you – the essential metrics for hashtag research. If you want to get a head start, take a look at your current Instagram posts. Head to the Insights section and see how well you are performing via hashtags currently – this is shown by the percentage of Impressions you are getting via hashtags on posts where you use them. If you have Flick’s Analytics Suite, you can start to look at which specific hashtags you are ranking highly on, which is key when it comes to your research and deciding which hashtags to use going forward.

Our course is designed for anyone – and that means anyone. Whether you are a beginner or an avid hashtag user, this course is for you. We will take you through all the basics of hashtags and hashtag research, but if you want to get a basic understanding of how hashtags work, before you dive in, we suggest reading our Instagram Hashtag Guide. This will give you everything you need to know about hashtags from start to finish, which will help you with your course material as you go on.

We hope you enjoyed this article, all about how you can prepare yourself and get started with your hashtag research and strategy. If you would like to sign up to our free course, just click here, or on the banner below!