Hashtags are an essential part of Instagram marketing and promotion. Hashtags are ‘descriptions’ associated with yourself and your music and act as a discovery tool. People search for the terms they are interested in.  If you are using the same search term or hashtag in your post, you can be discovered by other users increasing your potential following.

Here are five quick tips tips to help you get the most out of hashtags on Instagram.

Have Your Own Hashtags

By constantly using your own personal hashtags you create community and consistency around your ‘grams.  This could be #yourbandname or #yourfancommunityname. Ensure these are part of every post so that fans can easily discover your content and the content of other fans too.

Hit The Sweet Spot

Don’t think that if you use tags with 3 million plus mentions you’ll get a bigger audience for your content. In reality, you are likely to be lost in a very large crowd. As with most DIY musician activities, think niche.  Any hashtag with up to 100K posts is probably a good niche to sit in.

Don’t use the biggest hashtags, sit in a smaller niche.

Don’t Over ‘Tag

You’re allowed a maximum of 30 hashtags, research as to how many you should use varies but they tend to point to using around 7 to 15 for effectiveness.

Research

If you’re struggling judge the effectiveness of hashtags hashtagify.me is a good research tool.  It’s Twitter based but can give you an overview of a hashtag’s performance over time. www.all-hashtag.com is a fantastic tool which will suggest a range of other hashtags based upon an initial hashtag.

Don’t Spam

Try not to ‘leech’ traffic by tagging popular search terms such as #taylorswift or #brunomars which are irrelevant to your music. Only use these terms on posts where it is applicable such as when you might be wearing a Bruno Mars t-shirt or better still a clip of a video performance of you covering one of their songs.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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