Expand your reach with these trending hashtags — updated monthly.
Contents
How Do Hashtags on Instagram Work? Instagram Hashtag Types The Best Hashtags for Instagram (December 2024) Trending Fashion and Luxury Hashtags on Instagram (December 2024)Best Hashtags for Retail (December 2024)Trending Home Decor Hashtags (December 2024)Trending Media and Publishing Industry Hashtags (December 2024)Best Food and Beverage Hashtags (December 2024)Trending Hashtags for Sports (December 2024)Travel Hashtags for Instagram (December 2024)Trending Health and Wellness Industry Hashtags (December 2024)Hashtags have been a part of online culture since 2007 when Chris Messina introduced them in a blog. Since then, Instagram hashtags have been widely adopted throughout the platform to reach more users, label content and increase engagement.
How brands and users implement hashtags on Instagram has changed, but their function has remained relatively the same — and still essential for a robust Instagram strategy.
In this article, we explore:
Finding new, trending hashtags can be time-consuming for a busy social marketer — enter this guide. We update this blog monthly with trending hashtags for Beauty, Fashion and Luxury, Retail, Home, Media and Publishing, Food and Beverage, Sports, Travel and the Health and Wellness industry.
So, how do hashtags for Instagram work? Essentially, hashtags are used to index keywords on the platform. When a phrase or keyword is preceded by a '#' or 'pound' symbol, this group's related posts (except those from private accounts) appear when users view this hashtag. Individuals can click these to find related content, or brands might create their own to encourage participation in product releases, campaigns and other initiatives.
Instagram hashtags can fall into several categories — from branded content like hashtags that you create for their campaign, trending hashtags, seasonal hashtags for events like Christmas or significant events like Black Friday. The type of tag you select depends on the content you share, who you hope to reach and other variables.
Here are the most popular categories of hashtags:
Try these trending hashtags on Instagram this month.
Sharing fashion-focused content, or want to enhance posts from your luxury brand? Here are the most popular trending hashtags to use:
Depending on the type of retail industry your brand focuses on, hashtags from the home or fashion style might work for your brand — if you’re looking for more general hashtags for the retail industry, try one of these:
Whether it’s home improvement or home design, the home industry is a hyper-visual industry that can benefit from the right hashtag. Here are some trending home industry hashtags:
Often, the media and publishing industry use hashtags that aren’t necessarily specific to media and publishing, but focused on the event, books, author, event or topic they’re promoting on Instagram. However, there are some general hashtags used in the media and publishing industry that suit a variety of posts. Use these trending Instagram hashtags to bring attention to posts:
There’s an old saying that we ‘eat with our eyes’ — so what better forum to share food content than Instagram? Here are the best hashtags for Instagram to use for the food and beverage industry:
Here are the hashtags trending for the sports industry this month:
Promoting travel, luggage or anything else in the exploration realm? Tap into these trending travel hashtags:
Whether you're promoting marathons, light yoga or general health and wellness trends, here are health and wellness hashtags to expand your reach and engagement.
While hashtags are a great asset to Instagram posts, Reels and Stories, this doesn’t mean you should use 100 on each post or even the most popular ones. There are social media SEO best practices for the number of hashtags you incorporate into your posts. Here are a few tips to maximize your Instagram hashtag strategy.
Brands should be mindful to avoid ‘spamming’ hashtags — while Instagram lets you use up to 30, this can appear spammy. If brands want to use hashtags, consider how they can complement your caption and stick to 1-3 great, specific ones that offer the potential for good reach but aren’t too competitive, so your content has a chance to surface among ultra-competitive topics.
Before simply using the most popular hashtags, research which hashtags are most relevant to your brand, industry and specific post. Conducting an Instagram competitive analysis is also a great way to determine which hashtags your competitors are using. For example, Go Pro (@gopro) uses a combination of branded and categorical hashtags in its content. Its posts typically feature people using its product in an active set and use a variety of hashtags that reflect the individual image vs. a standard set of hashtags to use on every post.
It’s important to measure the performance of your efforts on social. While this can be difficult to do with hashtags, compare posts without and with hashtags. You can even contrast posts with 1-5 tags versus posts with fewer to gauge how the number of hashtags impacts your Instagram content so you can hone your strategy. A social analytics and monitoring tool will also help you track the performance of your hashtagged posts.
While hashtags can help increase reach, optimize the rest of your post and consider things like the best time to post on Instagram. Add relevant tags, a compelling caption (if you're posting around an event or holiday, like Valentine's Day for example, try a themed caption) and add trending Reels songs to ensure your posts can reach their maximum potential.
Using Instagram hashtags benefits your social media strategy as they increase reach, helping to bring your content in front of new audiences and potential followers. Instagram hashtags can also help you:
Dash Hudson is everything your Instagram account needs to succeed at each stage of your plan. Our Scheduler helps brands post and plan content, Social Analytics and Monitoring let you measure the performance of your efforts and Influencer and Creator Insights allow you to assess the impact of influencer partnerships on your overall business goals. Beyond this, Dash Hudson supports your visual strategy with Dash Hudson's Predictive Vision AI, which uses AI-powered insights that predict which visual content from your library will perform the best.
The number of hashtags you use will depend on your visual content marketing strategy. Instagram limits the number of hashtags you can include on a Feed or Reel post to 30, but we recommend using far less than this. If you’re not using a branded hashtag, have 3-5 on Reels and Feed posts. If including hashtags on your Reels post, limit hashtags to one, or use them sparingly with a small font that doesn’t distract from your central limit.
Yes, hashtags work on Instagram. The Instagram algorithm considers views when suggesting accounts. Hashtags can help increase reach, followers and engagement, especially from users who follow those hashtags. On average, Instagram Reels content with hashtags see 30% higher reach, 19% higher engagement rates, 18% higher Effectiveness Rates and 18% more shares than Reels content without hashtags.
Although using hashtags isn’t an end-all-be-all solution, they’re certainly part of a robust Instagram strategy.
Some brands can rely on the strength of their brand and content alone — for example, the Washington Post rarely uses hashtags in its Instagram content.
Adding the maximum number of hashtags isn’t necessarily the most effective way to use them on Instagram, but if this is something your brand wants to try, consider adding them in an Instagram comment immediately after posting. Instagram has confirmed adding hashtags in a comment will still surface the post if the hashtag is searched — if your caption is long enough, the hashtags won’t appear in their entirety. Conversely, Instagram captions are cut off at 125 characters, so if you write a long caption and add hashtags at the end, they won’t be visible unless users choose to view them.