By Maria Fox, Contributor
Instagram is an amazing marketing platform for businesses of all types and sizes and restaurants are no exception. Today, restaurant and food businesses are making the most of Instagram to attract more and more guests, maximize engagement, and build a loyal customer base.
When it comes to promoting your business and growing your following, having a strong Instagram presence is the key. Instagram is the cost-effective and valuable way to promote your restaurant as more and more people discover restaurants and delicious food recipes on Instagram feeds.
Having the right Instagram hashtags strategy in place is the key to your restaurant’s success that will make your marketing game strong. If you are wondering how to gain more engagement, more followers, and more credibility, optimizing your hashtags strategy is the answer.
Here are some proven ways to strategically optimize your Instagram hashtags to reach your potential followers and grow your authority.
Let’s dive in.
Using the Right Instagram Hashtags for Your Restaurant
In today’s Instagram-obsessed world, where approximately 69% of users take pictures of food before eating, creating a perfect Instagram marketing strategy for your restaurant is a sensible approach. Whether you own a restaurant, café or run a street food stall, Instagram is the best place to promote and grow your brand.
Source: @TravelwithGiul
A good way to make your Instagram posts famous is using the right hashtags so potential guests can find you and so your followers can identify you with the phrases you use. By incorporating relevant hashtags, you can reach the right people and get maximum engagement on the posts. Basically, hashtagging will make your posts discoverable and get your restaurant in front of food lovers, which will eventually bring more customers.
Brands that want to get a more targeted reach should harness the power of Instagram hashtags to make their posts discoverable. More importantly, hashtags help your prospective customers to find your restaurant and engage with your posts.
Source CompareCamp
According to Compare Camp statistics, Instagram posts with at least one relevant hashtag get 29% more interactions, while posts with 11 hashtags gain 79.5% more engagement. So, it is worth creating a powerful hashtag strategy for your ecommerce brand to promote your products and generate more sales.
How to Optimize Instagram Hashtags
Find the Right Instagram Hashtags for Your Restaurant
Choose Location Hashtags for Your Restaurant
Special Event Hashtags
Numbers of Hashtags to Use on Instagram
Use Hashtags in Stories
Use Branded Hashtags
Use Hashtags in Bio
Hashtags in the Comment
Hashtag-Based Campaigns
Use the Instagram Explore Page
Look at Your Competitors
Analyze Hashtag Performance
Find the Right Instagram Hashtags for Your Restaurant
When it comes to optimizing your Instagram hashtag strategy for your restaurant, café, bar, or food business, the very first thing you should keep in mind is to choose the relevant hashtag for your posts. Using hashtags that your potential customers are searching for is the key to bringing maximum engagement to your post. Finding the right Instagram hashtags will become easier if you take some time to research what your competitors are using, and which hashtags are relevant to your niche and audience.
Source: @RandysDonuts
It is not necessary to find the most popular Instagram hashtags for your posts; maybe they are not relevant for your target audience. Remember, the ultimate goal of using hashtags is to put you in front of your target audience and provide them with the right content when they land on your Instagram profile.
There are some tools that help restaurant business owners and marketers choose the right hashtags relevant to the content and niche.
Choose Location Hashtags for Your Restaurant
Using location-based hashtags for your Instagram posts is a great idea to promote your restaurant business locally. Using geo-modified hashtags will help you target local customers. Using your restaurant location in the hashtags is an effective restaurant marketing strategy that will drive customers to visit the restaurant and try a meal. For example, if you’re a sports bar in Boston, the hashtag #Boston, #Massachusetts and #BostonMA would be ideal to use to get in front of locals and tourists.
Furthermore, location hashtags will catch the attention of people searching for the restaurants in the specific location. For instance, if you have a coffee shop in London, using hashtags like #Londoncoffeeshop will garner the attention of people looking for coffee shops in London.
Special Event Hashtags
Source: @CartemsDonuts
Using holidays, special events and seasonal hashtags is a great strategy to strengthen your restaurant Instagram marketing. Whether it’s Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, National Burger Day, National Donut Day, World Vegan Day, or so on.
Create specific posts for these occasions and add seasonal and special events hashtags to your posts to create maximum engagement. Make sure to use the holiday hashtags, such as #ValentinesDay and #Vday, for example.
Source: @KanesDonuts
Numbers of Hashtags to Use on Instagram
How many hashtags should I use on Instagram posts? It is one of the most important things to consider when optimizing the Instagram hashtag strategy. According to Instagram, you are allowed to add up to 30 hashtags on a regular post and up to 10 hashtags on a Story. Just because Instagram allows you to add 30 hashtags doesn’t mean to forcefully add irrelevant or unnecessary hashtags to every post.
Source: Statista
According to Instagram Statistics, 11 hashtags are a good number to use in Instagram posts. According to Statista, the majority of Instagram posts the most common number of hashtags to use on Instagram is between 1 and 3.
The key is to experiment and determine the number of hashtags that work best for your business.
Use Hashtags on Stories
Using hashtags on Instagram Stories is one of the best ways to get more engagement and reach different communities. It is a great opportunity to give your content a significant boost and chance to be discovered by potential followers. You can add up to 10 hashtags and 1 clickable hashtag sticker on your Instagram story. You can either use the hashtag sticker or simply the text tool and type # on a photo or video post.
Have a look at this interesting infographic that will beautifully explain how to attract more followers to your Instagram stories.
Use Branded Hashtags
Source: BaoziInn-London
Branded hashtags are a powerful way to build a loyal community for your brand or business. You can use your brand’s name or a specific product that you offer as a branded hashtag.
By regularly using branded hashtags on your posts and stories, you will bolster your chances of appearing in a follower’s feed. You can entice followers to follow your branded hashtags as well as share their own images using these hashtags. From there, you can reshare them to your own feed or Stories as user-generated content or even put their posts on your digital signage.
Hashtags in the Bio
Source: NoodleWorship
It is also possible to include clickable branded hashtags in your Instagram profile bio. It gives brands a great opportunity to build a powerful Instagram bio and promote the preferred hashtags to get more reach.
The key is to use branded hashtags in the bio to make the most out of the character space available in the bio and drive more traffic to your restaurant.
Source: CartemsDonuts
You can also use hashtags to notify your audience about the new addition in the menu, special discount or any free offer on the selected menu.
Hashtags in the Comment
Source: Perkins Restaurant and Bakery
Instagram allows you to add hashtags to the post caption and comments as well. If you don’t want to use too many hashtags on your post, you can add them to the comment section.
Using hashtags to the comment section will give your post extra engagement. Furthermore, there are some tools, such as Sprout Social, and Later which allow you to automatically publish tags to the first comment.
Hashtag-Based Campaigns
If you are thinking of running a campaign, create hashtags for your campaign and ask followers to use the same hashtags. Running contests is one of the most effective and popular ways to collect user-generated content, drive engagement and reach a new audience. By using hashtags for your campaigns, you can easily promote your menu, upcoming food addition to the menu, or special event.
Source: TacoBell
Restaurant and food business owners can encourage the audience to tag the relevant content with branded hashtags by offering a giveaway. Create a contest and ask your followers to share photos or videos on Instagram with your branded hashtags to win a prize. This strategy will definitely help your content get more exposure and reach a wider audience. The campaign hashtags help you connect with your potential followers and promote your product or event.
Use the Instagram Explore Page
When you add hashtags to your posts and stories, it makes your content searchable from the Explore page. If someone is looking for the same hashtag and finds your story or post at the top of the Explore section, chances are they will follow your account for more interesting content. Try to get your Stories and posts featured on the Explore page, as it will help you build a wide network of followers that can make your brand popular on Instagram.
Look at Your Competitors
There is fierce competition in the restaurant and food industry. Like your coffee shop or donut outlet, many other food businesses are striving hard to compete to win and stay ahead of the game. It is a great idea to carefully monitor what your competitors are doing to get a better idea of which hashtag is driving maximum engagement.
They are definitely using the most relevant hashtags for their brand. You can gain valuable hashtag inspiration from your competitors and assess their content marketing strategy to come up with some better hashtag ideas for your Instagram posts.
For example, you can browse their top-performing posts with maximum engagement and likes and check the hashtags that are generating positive results. Maybe you find some great ideas while browsing your competitors’ Instagram feed. You can also come up with some alternative hashtags or the different hashtag combinations that could be used for your brand for future posts.
Analyze Hashtag Performance
It is important to measure the performance of your Instagram posts and find out the impact of hashtags. Keyhole, Iconosquare are some of the best Instagram tools to measure the Instagram hashtags progress.
There are a number of tools that help ecommerce marketers measure the hashtags’ performance. With the help of these tools, you can easily find out:
Engagement rate
Number of likes, comments, saves,
The number of views on a post
The number of unique visitors
The number of new followers
By analyzing the hashtag performance, you can come up with better and effective possibilities that work for your hashtag strategy. You will gain a better idea of which pattern to follow and which keyword combination to use/avoid. Making a few changes in the hashtags will help you achieve the desired result.
Final Words
No one can deny the effectiveness of the hashtag, it has now become one of the most effective marketing tools for brands, and an important feature of Instagram. Hopefully, now you are equipped with all the necessary information required to optimize Instagram hashtags to boost your following and maximize engagement. You can also hire a social media agency for your restaurant and food business that will definitely help you build your Instagram account from scratch; help you create content your audience wants to see and drive more sales.
About the Author:
Maria Fox is a creative writer, editor & craft specialist by profession, she’s associated with Branex design agency, she’s passionate about writing, traveling and photography.
