Blog
Oct 26
Why Are Your Instagram Hashtags NOT Working? 2 New Methods to Fix it

Why Are Your Instagram Hashtags NOT Working? 2 New Methods to Fix it

Why Are Your Instagram Hashtags NOT Working? Good news: They can work, and they will work if you update your strategy. Instagram hashtags, and a proper, advanced hashtag strategy are still one of the best tools for driving engagement on your posts.” at IQ Hashtags, we can’t agree more with these Benjamin Chacon’s words. That’s why today I’d like to discuss two super smart ways to level up your hashtag research along with the explanation why your old hashtags may not be working for you the way they should. We’ll mostly focus on two key factors: Potential Reach and Competition Score.

Do they ring a bell? Fear not if you haven’t heard them yet – I will explain everything, so it makes sense!

Why Are Your Instagram Hashtags NOT Working? Hashtags Still Work but Only When Used the Strategic Way

From my perspective: for me and my clients hashtags still work but only when chosen the strategic way.

Now you may want to ask: okay, now I know alot about keywords and how to use them but about hashtags? Should I still use them? Do they still work? Should I even bother with hashtags at all?

My protip? Use low volume keywords that don’t have such huge competition and they really can give your posts a visibility boost. 

How to find hashtags that still work? First, we need to analyze their search volume 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this term:

Search Volume tells you how many people are searching for a certain phrase, certain keyword.

And if you want to use third-party apps it’s also beneficial to analyze hashtags’ potential reach. There are a few tools that let you analyze these metrics, I use IQ Hashtags because I know this tool from their very start, and I even collaborated with them, because I really trust them, but from what I know a few different tools also help you analyze hashtag search volume and hashtag potential reach, but they are a bit more expensive, like Flick or Slay.so

I will show you the process with IQ Hashtags tool because I’ve been using this tool on a daily basis for more than 3 years and it works for me and for my clients, so let’s go, here’s the process of analyzing hashtags we want to use:

Is Instagram Lowering Your Reach?

Hashtag Competitiveness

Hashtag competitiveness lets you know how often a particular hashtag is used in other creators’ content. How competitive it is. 

A perfect hashtag has low competition score and high potential reach, which means it can give you high visibility but at the same time it isn’t too popular, because there’s this huge risk with too popular hashtags: too many creators use them and your post will instantly disappear in the flood of other posts in the Hashtag Explore Section.

So it’s good to stick to hashtags that don’t have a high competition score. For example for a keyword ugccreator, suggested hashtags look like this:

how to fix low engagement instagram

So as you can see we can choose many hashtags that have a medium competition score, which is more friendly for accounts that don’t have a million followers.

Hashtags’ Potential Reach 

This is the second metric that is worth analyzing, and as I’ve already told you, here we look for hashtags with medium or high potential reach, as they have the higher potential to give our content a visibility boost. So for instance these three hashtags look good and it should be difficult to rank high with them. They’re the strategic choices.

Screenshot 2023 07 19 at 17.33.31

Screenshot 2023 07 19 at 17.28.42

Potential Reach 2 min

 

screenshot 2022 12 12 at 13.55.52
Scroll to top