If you’re serious about upping your Instagram engagement, now is the time to get serious about researching your Instagram hashtags.

You’ve spent a lot of time working on your content categories, writing your caption, but now it’s post time. DO NOT forget about the hashtags. Hashtags are how your future followers are going to find you, so don’t skip out on researching!

Free Tools for Research:

1. Using the Instagram app, go to the “tag” hub in the Explore tab of Instagram. How you get there is by looking for the magnifying search icon 🔍, clicking the top search bar, and you’ll see “Top”, “Accounts”, “Tags”, and “Places.” Select the “Tags” tab and begin typing out the hashtags that you want to explore. For example, put in “beer” and you will see related tags to beer. You’ll want to use posted hashtags with numbers under 1,000,000 therefore, I try to keep mine anywhere from 10,000 to 500,000. For each tag, you’ll look through and find low to high hashtag posted tags. Grab a spreadsheet or notes on your phone and keep track of them.

2. Second place to get them free is to research your competition. See what they’re using and go back to the “Tag” hub on Instagram and research those tags and those tags related to it.

Two Paid Hashtag Tools That I Stand By:

The two are quite similar but the main difference is that one you can view from your desktop and the other is an app for a mobile device. I have loved using both Hashtag For Likes and Hashtag Expert. Hashtags for Likes is a desktop tool where you can develop hashtag campaigns, find related hashtags, look at analytics, other people’s profiles, etc. Hashtag Expert is an application to download on your phone that assists you in researching hashtags, keeping categories, finding similar hashtags, and analyzing them.

Action step: Start researching those hashtags! Go look at your competition to see what they are providing and keep the hashtags in a folder or document to stay organized.