Social media is a growing marketplace for all kinds of businesses, and Instagram is at the heart of it.

While consumers are often annoyed by ads on blogs or news sites, they don’t feel that way about marketing on social media. Research has found that people enjoy discovering new brands on Instagram. Not only that, but according to a recent study, 90% of people patronize businesses they follow on social media. 

Here’s another statistic for you: Instagram counts more than a billion users each month. So if you’re not already marketing on the platform, you need to be.

But marketing on Instagram is more than just advertising. You can reach users organically through a strong, branded profile and a sound Instagram hashtag strategy.

The top business hashtags on Instagram

Your hashtags strategy should start with some quick research into the most popular business/corporate hashtags on Instagram. Here are a few of them:

#business
#B2B
#B2C
#startups
#startup
#executive
#csuite
#ecommerce
#leads
#leadgeneration
#wontstop
#hustle
#corporate
#internetbusiness

Though you need to be aware of the most popular business hashtags, you won’t want to use all of them. For one thing, they’re all fairly saturated already—#business has 75 million posts. For another, they are pretty general, and you will likely want to get more specific. We’ll talk more about that below. 

So pick a few of the hashtags on the list, or find your own. It’s easy to build off an existing list of hashtags to find less competitive ones once you know how.

Wondering how many business hashtags you should use? Although recommendations vary, some research suggests that the optimal number is 11.

How to find the best business hashtags

Let’s say you want to use a hashtag that has “business” in it, but you don’t want to compete with the 75 million posts already in the #business pool. All you have to do is type #business into the search box, and you’ll see a list of predictive suggestions in a drop-down list. Under each suggestion is the number of posts already associated with that tag.

For example, you’ll find #businessowner, with 12 million posts, #businesstips (3 million posts), #businessideas (900,000 posts), and #businessinsider (340,000 posts).

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNaAOBxqXJ5/

Repeat this process with a few other hashtags until you’ve found a handful that you like.

Niche down

You can go ahead and use some of the more popular hashtags, but you should also choose some with smaller ponds in which you can be the big fish.

You can easily find less competitive hashtags by incorporating your specialty in the hashtag. Just for example, you can get the 1.7 million posts in #b2b down to a manageable 500 if you use #b2bsoftware instead.

Identifying and using the best hashtags for your business doesn’t take much effort, and it’s well worth the time you put into it. So do the research, then start tagging your posts, and watch your engagement and conversions climb. You won’t regret it.