As hashtag experts, one of the first questions people ask us is âWhy are my Instagram Hashtags not working?!â or âDo hashtags really work on Instagram?â Even though your content may look great, and your captions on point, despite your enthusiastic hashtagging, people just arenât discovering your posts.
You can take a deep breath and a sigh of relief because weâre about to answer all of your concerns and questions. So, if youâre wondering why your hashtags arenât working, read onâŚ
So, why are my Instagram hashtags not working?
One possibility is that your posts arenât showing up in the hashtag search results at all, so new users arenât seeing your content.
Another is that your hashtags are simply failing to expand the reach and engagement of your posts. If this is the case, then theyâre not working as a useful tool to grow your account. And they should be â when used right, hashtags are one of the best tools for successful Instagram account growth.
Here are some of the things you might be doing wrong, leading to hashtags ânot workingâ:
For maximum exposure on Instagram, you should stick to using the most popular hashtags. Right?
Not exactly. Popular hashtags are great in the sense that more people search for and look at them. But theyâre also super competitive. That means that if you use a popular hashtag, your post is competing with the hundreds of thousands (even millions) of other posts using that hashtag.
To put it another way, your post is like a needle in a haystack.
Hashtags can also be too competitive if the people ranking highly in them are getting a high average number of likes on their content (or higher average engagement than you do) â which helps to push their posts up and leaves yours to get lost in the lower results.
So, whatâs the solution?
Broaden out your hashtag selection to include terms that are less competitive, and more descriptive. For example, rather than #yoga, you might try #yogaforbeginners or #getonyourmat. Even better, go for a combination of broad/popular hashtags and specific niche ones to cover both bases. If you want to learn more about how to create the right balance of competitive, and non-competitive hashtags to hit the strategy sweet spot,
click here.2. Youâre using hashtags that arenât related to your content đ¤
You might want to capitalize on a trending hashtag by adding it to your post, but if itâs not completely relevant to your content youâre wasting your time. Worse â you might even get people offside. If someone is searching for #gymadvice, and they see a picture of something totally unrelated, they wonât pay attention.
On the other hand, if you keep your hashtags highly relevant to your content, youâll maximize your potential for engagement. This is simply because thereâs a greater chance that people searching for that hashtag will be interested in your post. Makes sense, right?
Instagram are pretty particular about their community guidelines. So hashtags that are found to sit outside of those guidelines get flagged for assessment and, potentially, get banned altogether.
So what happens if you use these flagged or banned hashtags in your posts?
Letâs just say, nothing good. Your posts wonât be discoverable for those hashtags, and you risk the chance
that your Instagram account will be shadowbanned â aka,
your posts wonât be seen by anyone who doesnât already follow you â leaving
you to wonder why your Instagram hashtags arenât working.
Itâs not easy to know which Instagram hashtags you should avoid.
Flickâs hashtag tool automatically removes any that are flagged or banned when suggesting which hashtags to use, and will
allow you to audit your selection of hashtags before you post.Another potential reason for your Instagram hashtags not working is that youâre doing a copy-paste of the same hashtags over and over again. While this makes life easier, it, unfortunately, isnât going to win over you the audience you want.
Why not? Firstly, because your account could be penalized for spamming those hashtags (even if thatâs not your intention).
Secondly, because youâre not casting your net wide enough. To reach more of an audience, you want to maximize the potential for people to find your content â and that means broadening out your hashtag use. Different people may search for different hashtags, so you could be shooting yourself in the foot by casting your net to the same pool of people, over and over again.
On top of that, users who see your content repeatedly for a hashtag they follow can select the option âdonât show for this hashtagâ on your posts. All the more reason not to put all your Instagram hashtag eggs in one basket.
5. Youâre not considering contextual relevance đź
You may not see it, but behind Instagram are
AI functions that analyse images and detect their content. To what degree this happens and the accuracy of it is constantly changing â but if you consider Facebookâs face recognition AI (remembering that Facebook owns Instagram) youâll have an idea of what we mean. And these days,
social media platforms are becoming more and more intelligent at recognizing other objects and branding elements as well as faces.
This capability means that itâs worth considering the contextual relevance of your hashtags. In other words, you should think about using your hashtags to describe the literal content of your images, helping the platform to analyze and contextualize your posts.
You can read more about how to do this
here, but to give a quick example: letâs say youâre posting a picture of your lunch. A hashtag without
contextual relevance would be something general like #lunchdate, while contextually relevant hashtags would describe whatâs on your plate (#veganburrito, #beansandrice, etc).
6. Youâre rushing it đââď¸
We get it â painstakingly thinking about and researching which hashtags to use for every single post can be boring and time-consuming (thatâs exactly why Flick was created!). It can also be confusing if you donât really know what youâre doing.
The best safeguard here is to have an
Instagram hashtag strategy in place. Make sure you
understand how Instagram hashtags work and how to source out the best ones for your content.
Having a strategy will make life easier because it gives you guidelines to work within, and you can constantly analyze your results to understand which hashtags are working, and which ones arenât. Youâll know what types of hashtags to use, the ratio of popular to niche hashtags to use, and how to group your hashtags for maximum impact.
Not big on reading? Donât worry â you can also watch our hashtag guide below!
Once youâve started using your hashtag strategy, you can use Flickâs in-built Analytics Suite to view which hashtags you ranked on, which position you ranked in, and whether or not they are low, medium or high competition hashtags in relation to your account and engagement. From there, you can keep hashtags that are creating traffic, and remove hashtags that arenât working!
From there, giving every post the hashtag research time it deserves will be much easier, and will feel like second nature.
