Instagram Hashtags: How to Find the Best Hashtags for Likes

How exactly does one find the best hashtags for likes to use on their Instagram posts?

Instagram hashtags are important if you want to get more reach and engagement to your posts.

However, finding the right hashtags that will drive lots of likes to your post is challenging.

There are tons of generic hashtag advice out there on the internet. Most of them don’t work as well as we hope them too.

You might spend hours finding and compiling a bunch of relevant hashtags to your niche. But when you actually use them in your posts, you don’t get as many likes as you hoped for.

What if there was an effective and actionable strategy you could use right now that will skyrocket your number of likes per post?

Read on, because this article contains a step-by-step strategy you can use to find and use the best hashtags for likes and example hashtags that you can copy and paste.

Table of contents

Here’s an overview about what you’ll learn and benefit after reading this article.

What are hashtags for?

In this section, you will learn why hashtags are important and their main usage.

Max number of hashtags to use

This section focuses on the maximum and perfect number of hashtags you can use on Instagram to get the most amount of likes.

Should you place hashtags in the comments or caption?

Do hashtag placements matter? Read this section to find out whether you should place hashtags in the comment section or in your caption.

How to find the best hashtags for likes

This section contains a step-by-step guide you can use to find the best hashtags you can use to get the most amount of likes.

Hashtags for likes (copy & paste)

Skip to this section if you want a list of researched hashtags you can copy and paste for likes.

General FAQ

Frequently asked questions about hashtags.

What are hashtags for?

Firstly, Instagram hashtags can increase the number of likes you’re getting per post.

This is because your posts will have a chance of getting discovered.

Now, you might be wondering, why do some people deliberately look up hashtags and engage on various recent posts?

Whenever someone searches for a hashtag related to your niche, they might stumble on your post in the recent section and engage in it. This is because they’re hoping for you to engage back in their posts and possibly even follow them.

The whole point of people doing this is to engage in as many posts as possible related to your niche with the hopes of others reciprocating.

Which brings us to the next point, the predominance of bots.

Certain hashtags are being targeted by bots. This means that immediately after you’ve posted something (with relevant hashtags), you’ll get an immediate automated surge of likes.

These likes are mostly from accounts belonging to real people that are automated. In fact, most likes from hashtags are being automated which is the reality of Instagram.

Hashtags act as a search engine. Hashtags are the keyword you’d type in to find whatever niche you’re looking for.

Secondly, you can grow more followers.

There is a small chance that people who engage in your posts through hashtags will follow you.

Again, they do this for the hopes of you following them back.

Lastly, you can increase your conversions through unique business hashtags, also known as branded hashtags.

For instance, McDonald’s created its own branded hashtag #ShamrockShakeSZN to encourage others to utilize it whenever sharing their shamrock products.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9mI3dAHJSL/

A branded hashtag for your business compiles all your content and your customer’s content (whenever they utilize the hashtag) into one searchable place.

Additionally, whenever someone posts a photo/story related to your product, services or giveaway, their followers would be inclined to click on the hashtag out of curiosity.

This is a brilliant marketing strategy, especially if your business has a decent to large amount of followers.

Max number of hashtags to use

The maximum number of hashtags you should use is 30. Any more than that and you might put your account at risk of getting a shadowban.

If you haven’t heard of a shadowban, it’s basically the act of hiding your posts on the hashtag search results. This will decrease your post’s reach tremendously.

In other words, if your account is shadowbanned, utilizing hashtags on your posts will be redundant.

Should you place hashtags in the comments or caption?

The billion dollar question is – “Should you place hashtags in the comment section or in your caption?”.

Hashtags in the comments	Hashtags in the caption
Hidden in the comment section ✔️	Obstructs your caption ❌
You can easily delete them ✔️	You need to edit the entire caption ❌
Delayed reach ❌	Instantaneous reach ✔️

According to the table above, placing hashtags in the comments is the winner – by a tad bit.

However, the only disadvantage that placing hashtags in the comments has over placing hashtags in the caption is that you need to be extremely quick with your copy-pasting skills.

If you’re intending to place hashtags in the comment section, you’ll need to paste the bunch of hashtags in the comments immediately after you’ve posted to maximize its reach and engagement.

However, if the hashtags are in your caption, you don’t have to worry because your photo/video will appear in the recent hashtags section right after you’ve posted it.

You can place hashtags either in the comments or caption, it only makes a subtle difference.

At the end of the day; whether you’re placing hashtags in the comments or in your caption, it only makes a slight difference in terms of engagement.

How to find the best hashtags for likes

Disclaimer: This is a step-by-step guide on how to find the best hashtags that will drive the most amount of likes to your posts in the shortest amount of time. This is not a guide to find hashtags based on your niche through organic research.

This is a rather technical guide, so pay close attention to each step.

After doing some intensive research, Portuguese hashtags seem to drive the most amount of likes. This is because quite a number of their hashtags are targeted by automation.

So, you’ll get an immediate surge of likes if you utilize a group of specific hashtags.

In this case, let’s focus on an individual hashtag, #sdv. ‘Sdv’, or Sigo de Volto (in Portuguese) means ‘I follow back’ (in English).

Firstly, type ‘sdv’ on the search bar and navigate to tags.

By looking at the top section, you can tell that there are lots of posts with the repetitive phrase, ‘Chuva De Seguidores’, which translates to ‘Rain Of Followers’ in English.

Basically these posts encourage users to comment ‘sdv’ in the comment section. People will then follow whoever who commented it, and hope for a follow back.

Secondly, navigate to recent.

Then, click on any of the posts on the feed.

Your goal is to find the post with the most number of likes that have posted very recently and that account should have a low number of followers.

That way you can deduce that the likes they are getting is not from their followers, but almost entirely from the hashtags they are using.

As you can see, this post has 22 likes and has posted only 2 minutes ago.

This means that a majority, if not all of their likes are driven from hashtags alone.

To back this hypothesis, let’s take a look at their followers.

This person only has 4 followers and garnered 22 likes on a post in 2 minutes. In other words, the hashtags that this person has been using are highly effective and targeted by automation.

That only means one thing – you can take advantage of these hashtags.

Hashtags like these have lots of bot activity that haven’t been banned yet. So you can take advantage of them.

Now, let’s take a look at the hashtags they have been using.

Thus, as these hashtags are driving lots of likes, you can copy it on your notes and use it in your future posts.

However, you can’t copy comments on Instagram using your mobile device, so you’ll have to switch to your desktop.

To conclude, here are the copied hashtags from the above post:

If you’re looking for a complete guide to Instagram Marketing, feel free to read this:

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Author: Lim How Wei. Lim How Wei is the founder of Followchain, a community that simplifies growth and networking for Instagram users. Feel free to follow him on Instagram.