Hashtags, hashtags, hashtags.  You love them or you hate them. Either way, using the right hashtags for your social media posts can help bring more eyes to your small business marketing. But how do you know which hashtags are right for your social media posts, which ones you have a fighting chance to get noticed by potential customers? Researching which hashtags to use for your Instagram or LinkedIn posts can make all the difference. In this post, I’m going to show you how to do hashtag research, a really easy and free way for Instagram and for LinkedIn and show you what a few of the differences are between the two and how they show hashtags. 

How to do hashtag research for Instagram

So doing hashtag research on Instagram is pretty easy. I find it easiest to do it on a desktop, as it’s a lot easier to copy and paste hashtags into a spreadsheet. All you'll need to this hashtag research is a web browser open to Instagram, plus a spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Sheets.  

Doing hashtag research on Instagram is pretty easy, it just takes a bit of time to accumulate a good list of hashtags that are relevant to the type of posts your create. To start, on Instagram all you do is you just search for the hashtag relating to the subject you want. I usually start with a relatively broad hashtag so you can see suggestions relating to the subject you’re searching about. 

Which hashtags should you choose for your Instagram posts?

When it comes to actually choosing which hashtags to add to your lists, remember that you are in the end competing with other Instagrammers for people to see your post, so the tags with the largest number of posts might not always be the best ones to use. Take #digitalmarketing for example. This hashtag has got a few million posts on The Gram. The search results freed for such tags get refreshed every few seconds, with hundreds of new posts added to its list. This means that if you use just tags with millions of posts, your post is going to get lost in the mix. Your post will be way down at the bottom of the feed within a couple of minutes, whereas by comparison with a hashtag that has a few hundred thousand or thousand posts, you have a higher chance of getting some exposure. A perfect example of this is #digitalmarketingexpert as it only has 94,000 posts. Using those super niche hashtags gives you a much better chance to get some more exposure. 

How to do hashtag research for LinkedIn

So on LinkedIn, instead of the number of posts, LinkedIn shows you the number of followers of that hashtag. Let’s try the example again #digitalmarketing. 

So see how many followers there are? That's a huge amount! A large following can get you a lot of exposure, but it also means that there's probably a lot of posts as well so you'd be competing against from companies such as SEMrush and some of the big digital marketers out there like Rand Fishkin and Company. But unlike Instagram, people use LinkedIn for a different purpose. It’s not only a networking resource but an informational one. Someone who follows a particular hashtag on LinkedIn most likely is seeking out information on that given subject for professional development. They will take their time briefly reading posts for that hashtag to learn. So even if you may be competing with very well known brands for space on a given hashtag, there’s still a good chance to get a lot more exposure and awareness of your brand. 

So that's how you do keyword research the easy and free way. I would recommend doing this research maybe once every six months, definitely at least once a year because numbers do change, trends happen and you might find that there's one hashtag that you can't seem to get enough of, and that you want to really hone in on the amount of exposure that you're getting with that tag. Either way, whether you like them or not, hashtags will help get eyes on your business and get you the potential customers you need to grow.