Are you looking to get the most out of your Social Media Marketing efforts and improve your Inbound Marketing Strategy?

Then you should pay attention to the Hashtags you’re using and you should conduct a Hashtag research for every Social Media Channel you’re using.

In this article, we’ll be going into the importance of hashtags, how to find the best one per social channel and we’ll provide you a template.

Let’s get started!

The importance of Hashtags

Keywords and Hashtags help Social Media Platforms to understand what your post is about and who should see your post.

If you add no hashtags at all, you’ll be missing out on exposure.
If you add irrelevant hashtags, you’ll miss out on engagement.
If you add too competitive hashtags, your post will often drown.
If you add the right mix of hashtags to every post, you’ll get the best bang for your buck.

The importance of the right Hashtag mix

Adding hashtags that are relevant is thus important.

The ‘Mix’ is the right combination of popular vs less popular hashtags.

You can find both for every niche.

The reason you should mix it up is to make sure your post will be shown with the lower competition hashtags and that if you’re lucky and get enough engagement, you’ll also be shown for the more popular hashtags.

Your mix is personal.

If you have a low following and are in a highly competitive niche, your mix will contain mostly less competitive hashtags.

If you already have a large audience that engages with your posts, your mix will contain more competitive hashtags with a higher potential to reach a large audience.

Doing a hashtag research

So how do you know which hashtags fall in which bucket?

A hashtag research helps you to find out just that and to document them for later use.

You can access our hashtag research template here for free (no signup needed).

It lives within our Growth Storytelling Framework where the keyword research template, content distribution strategy and other tactical and strategic documents sit.

The hashtag research template looks a little bit like the image below:

On the left, you see relevant hashtags and on the right, you see your main Social Media channels.

Now you can do your hashtag research and find out how popular hashtags are on each platform.

As you can see, if differs a lot.

That is why it is so important to do your research. Invest a couple of minutes before posting your content and eventually, you’ll have a complete list of relevant hashtags per channel. Social Media channels showcase the popularity of the hashtags differently. Some name it ‘number of times seen (TikTok) others, showcase # followers (LinkedIn), and Instagram shows how many posts exist with that hashtag. It’s fair to say that they all indicate how competitive hashtags are.

Now let’s go over how you can find the best hashtags.

Find the best hashtags (per social media channel)

Just like social media channels naming the popularity of hashtags differently, you’ll also need different approaches to find which are the best hashtags per channel.

One pro tip I want to give straight off the bat is: Click on the relevant hashtag and see if it’s actually relevant.

Let’s get into it.

How to find the best hashtags on TikTok

Let’s start with one of the easiest social media platform to find the data you need.

To find out what the best hashtags are on TikTok for your business, you simply need to go to search -> enter your hashtag -> write down the number of ‘times seen’ on your hashtag research template -> scroll down -> find other relevant hashtags -> write them down and repeat.

Now, remember.

Having the date on your template is just the start. When posting, you need to create a mix of relevant hashtags and include ‘easy’ and more competitive hashtags to get the best results.

How to find the best hashtags on Instagram

Now for finding the best hashtags on Instagram, you would need to put in a little more effort.

You can still simply search for the hashtag and see how many posts have that hashtag to see how popular a hashtag is, but Instagram does not show you related hashtags in the same view as TikTok. So it’s a bit more of a manual exercise.

But the same applies. After you’ve done you found all relevant hashtags and have noted them down in your research sheet, you create a mix of hashtags for your next post.

How to find the best hashtags for Twitter

To find the best hashtags for Twitter, you need to use a tool.

Twitter does not showcase the popularity of a hashtag easily. For some hashtags they showcase how many have used it in a Tweet in the last hour, but that can differ a lot.

We advise using RiteTag. Simply create an account and get the data you need for your research.

Simply write down the number under ‘hashtag exposure per hour’ (eye icon) in your sheet and build your list for the next time you’re going to send out an awesome Tweet.

How to find the best hashtags on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the last platform that we’re going to discuss but it does not mean that you should stop here. If Pinterest or Tumblr or whichever social media channel is important to you, you should definitely do your research for those too.

Add hashtags that matter most to your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy and reach the right people in your extended audience.

To find the best hashtags on LinkedIn you basically need to click the first hashtag you encounter and you will be brought to a new page where you will see this on top:

From here, change the url to fit the hashtag you want to get data on.

For example. ‘contentstrategy’ should be changed to your new keyword and then press enter.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=contentstrategy -> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=contentcreation

It’s a bit of work but it’s pretty straightforward and well worth your time.

If you want to check out how powerful it is to do your hashtag research, check out some popular LinkedIn company pages and click on some random hashtags. You’ll often see a post that has for instance one hashtag that has 1,000,000 followers and two hashtags that has no followers or 6 or so. That’s not a great mix!

Get the most out of your hashtag research

That’s all there is to it. It’s not difficult to do your research you just need to be willing to put in the work a couple of times.

Be sure to access the template here for free. It has all kind of other cool resources included.

To make the most out of it, you really need to make it your own with your own social media channels and you need to experiment and learn. Try different hashtags and different mixes and see what works best for you.

All the best!

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