What is a hashtag strategy? And do I need one for my dental practice?

11 February 2022

Building an effective Instagram hashtag strategy can help to boost your content’s reach on the platform. Hashtags are a powerful feature that help to boost organic reach and engagement.

Building an effective Instagram hashtag strategy can help to boost your content’s reach on the platform. Hashtags are a powerful feature that help to boost organic reach and engagement. Users can leverage existing hashtags to get their work categorized with other relevant posts. It’s also possible to reach new followers who follow specific hashtags.

Knowing how to use hashtags effectively could be a game-changer for your dental practice.

Now I’ve caught your attention, lets learn how Instagram Hashtags actually work!

Think of hashtags as a library of content. Hashtags work by categorizing your content that ultimately helps to place your account alongside similar content. By working in this way, they help your posts appear alongside similar content, improve engagement, and build your identity on the platform.

Users on Instagram can also choose to follow specific hashtags in order to see more content related to a certain topic or niche. When you use a hashtag that someone follows, your content is more likely to show up on their news feed, regardless if they follow you or not. This is how you can broaden your audience and reach more people.

How do you decide which Hashtags to use in your strategy?

Instagram hashtags can be divided into three main groups: high, moderate, and low popularity; each group will perform in different ways on the platform. Hashtags with a large number of posts (think 1M+ posts) are used a lot of times during the day and get a lot of traffic, so it can be difficult to get your content seen if you only focus on hashtags with a high saturation.

• Three to five popular hashtags (1M+ associated posts)
• Another three to five moderately popular hashtags (500k to 1M)
• Then, three to five hashtags in a small area specific to your niche (less than 500k)
• One to two hashtags specific to your brand, and which you have created

Using the total number of hashtags suggested in this list brings users up to 17. That means there are still 13 spaces to fill before you reach 30, if you choose to use every available hashtag.

Our special sauce

We have worked with dentists and dental practices for a number of years on social media marketing, strategy and everything in between. As a result we have developed a secret recipe on how to approach hashtag selection, and for the first time we are going to share it with you, our lovely blog readers.

Many people when choosing hashtags, choose the tags that reflect them. For example a social media marketer may choose the following tags: #socialmediamarketer #socialmediamarketing #digitalmarketer

By the way the hashtag system works, its will categorise the content alongside other digital/social media content. With me so far?

But what if you want to use Instagram to find new patients? #dentist isn’t the best tag to use, as your dental related content will be collated alongside other dentist content. So whats the solution?

Use the hashtags your audience is using to about themselves!

Think about it for a minute, if you’re trying to target mums in Manchester for example, who may want to start the new year with a new smile you’ll attract more of your target audience’s attention by using the tag #ManchesterMums.

How about trying to increase the number of smile makeover enquiries – brides and grooms would be a good bet. Everyone wants to have the perfect smile on their wedding day, right? So #summerbride2022 #ManchesterBride #BrideToBe2022 would be much better choices to serve your special offer to.