Ep 50 HWH: New IG Feature & Strategy

Instagram notoriously changes things up and a few months ago they said to reduce down to 8-15 hashtags but recently I saw in my feed about the new number of hashtags which is way less. 

I’m going to share with you how we are going to reposition our strategy at Social Global Grind. The recommendation from Instagram creators’ accounts was to choose between 3-5 hashtags that resonate with your audience and focus on your niche. 

Now, hashtags are very similar to keywords and every platform has its own form of this, but for this blog, I’ll focus on Instagram. 

The strategy:

If you’re a small business and want to be able to be easily found on google let’s take a look at the approach. If you have a coffee shop in Auckland and more specifically Mission Bay, you will want to include location-specific hashtags that are relevant to your niche ie #coffeeshopmissionbay. You’ll also want to be tagging things your customers might talk about ie #coffeecatchup or certain coffee vendors #allpress – in New Zealand each region has specific coffee vendors that are popular so tailor to this kind of niche. You can also do a search for hashtags on Instagram to see if the area has an active hashtag or following. 

Once you have these 5 hashtags, set them aside – you won’t be using them on every post, you’ll create new ones for more specific posts ie with your products, promotions etc. The other thing you need to do is to put the hashtags in the caption of the post. Instagram has now said it works better with hashtags in the caption which is a change from algorithms in the past. One way to experiment is to search for something you think that consumers are looking for to find you ie #coffeeshopmissionbay. 

The Message:

It is about really landing the message. If we switch to looking at other industries we find that we sometimes tend to talk to other people within the industry ie focussing on sales in real estate, as opposed to talking directly to the consumer. 

If we continue with the real estate industry, listing before Christmas before the property shortage is a great strategy because Christmas for us is summer; this is the time families start to shift and think about the following year. 

An example message could be “Real estate experts in Mission Bay, list now before Christmas, get in touch.” What you want is to break this down into multiple posts ie. focus on the experts, get interviews, reels, videos with the team, then pull another story from this focussing on listing now before Christmas – what are the advantages and benefits of listing now? This way you can have niche posts covering the same message but in different ways and introduce specific hashtags. 

Its also great to have a hashtag specifically for your business as over time you’ll get traction and a following based on the search. New Zealand as a country is still getting used to delivering a product or service through social media when compared to Australia, the UK and the US so it’ll take some time for consumers to learn. 

We’d love to hear from you if you have any questions about your account or if you’re not sure if you’re doing it right. 

Email us at mail@socialglobalgrind.com