Let’s talk for a moment about healthy food hashtags for Instagram – and in fact, all food hashtags for Instagram. We’re going to look at some of the most popular food hashtags and how to find the hashtags that will work best for your food, nutrition or wellness Instagram account.
WHAT ARE INSTAGRAM HASHTAGS?
Hashtags are signposts or descriptions used on photos and videos to help Instagram users find photos. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags either in your caption or in a comment. Hashtags start with the # sign and don’t have any spaces. When you click on a hashtag, you’re taken to a page showing all of the public photos and videos with that hashtag. Instagram selects the most engaging photos to be at the top of the page and the rest are in chronological order. Because of the higher visibility of those top photos, which can remain for a few hours or days, many Instagram users want to appear there.
WHICH FOOD HASHTAGS TO USE ON INSTAGRAM
This differs for everyone. Most of your hashtags are going to be the ones that your target market uses, so that you show up in their feed searches. You can also mix in some trending hashtags or ones that celebrate a particular occasion or season. Bear in mind that the most popular hashtags with millions of photos move quickly, so that in even a few minutes, you’re likely to disappear from the top 50 of a feed. You might want to experiment with different sets of hashtags, finding out which ones give you most visibility for your kind of photos, your food niche and your number of followers.
HOW TO STORE GROUPS OF INSTAGRAM HASHTAGS
It can be useful to keep different groups of Instagram hashtags for your account. If you’re a food blogger, for instance, you might post about healthy family recipes, slow cooker recipes and meal plans for fussy eaters. While there might be some hashtags you could use across all three posts, you are going to want to add in the niche hashtags for just slow cooker recipes or meal plans for fussy eaters.
Once you have created a set of hashtags, you can store them simply in the notes in your phone, ready to cut and paste. Schedulers such as Later, Plann and Planoly also can store your sets of hashtags. You can read how to use these schedulers for sets of hashtags below:
Using sets of hashtags in Plann
Using sets of hashtags in Planoly
Using sets of hashtags in Later
MAXIMISING YOUR HASHTAGS
Once you have your sets of hashtags and are using them, don’t forget to visit those hashtag streams and engage with others there every day. It is easy to think of Instagram as a platform simply as a traffic source and in fact, it is a place for making connections. It is a place for us to find our tribe, so please reach out with likes and meaningful comments. As there are so many spam robots posting comments like ‘nice pik’, when we comment in a real way, sharing our feelings about a photo in the stream or our thoughts on the caption, it can be a breath of fresh air.
It also means, if that person is monitoring their comments, they’re more than likely to look at your Instagram profile to see who you are. If you have a clear bio that spells out who you are and who you serve, if they are your tribe, they are likely to follow you and at least like and comment back on your account.
The bonus of leaving real comments with a spirit of generosity is also a ‘feel good’ task – you have the ability to make someone’s day, even if you aren’t getting the likes or comments you might like on your Instagram account and that can feel rather wonderful.