7 Top Hashtag Mistakes that Schools make... and how to avoid them!
Hashtags are a quick and effective way to drive further reach and engagement of your Instagram grid posts and reels, but it’s easy to make some fundamental mistakes that can either damage your brand, reduce effectiveness, or even worse - make your school look out of touch on the ‘Gram and alienate your target audiences.
Read on to find out what NOT to do when hashtagging on your school accounts.
1. Not checking the hashtag makes sense when you join two or more words together
In some cases, this can even create an embarrassing new word! Either make sure you eagle eye your hashtags before posting, or use upper and lower case to define words, helping legibility for the reader. Here are a few examples: #IndependentSchool #PrepSchool #SportsDay
2.Including symbols or spaces. This will break your hashtag, making it nonsensical. It’s worth noting that you can use emojis within hashtags, but our advice is to do this sparingly and check out the number of searches before posting.
3. Using too many or too few hashtags. Stick to around 9 as a rule of thumb. Too many detract from your message and readers tend to ignore captions with too many hashtags. Too few will leave you with a lower potential reach.
4.Putting hashtags within sentences. It can look spammy and is a throw-back to the limited 280 character restrictions of Twitter. Instagram has a generous character limit of 2,270 per caption, so there’s no need to cram them in within a sentence. Instead, pop them at the end of the caption, separated by hitting return to give a bit more space.
5. Jumping on every bandwagon. Not all will be appropriate for the sector, and using trending hashtags without fully checking out what it means could result in linking your school’s brand to something inappropriate. As best practice, run a quick search for the hashtag yourself to see how it’s being used in practice by others (go to your School’s Instagram account, ‘search’, and ‘hashtags’). There are also various online tools available to help you ideate and research hashtags before using them.
6. Using super-long hashtags. Remember, hashtags are used like search terms (for both users and the Instagram algorithm) - but less longtail than in a regular Google / Search Engine. Put yourself in the user's shoes - what words would you use to search for a topic?
7.Keeping your hashtag knowledge to yourself! If you have other members of staff posting on your main or ancillary accounts, or alumni, students, and parents / friends of the school with Instagram accounts linked to the school, share your knowledge (or this post!) for increased consistency.
We hope these tips will help you get started or improve your existing hashtags, but if you’d like further support in creating and implementing a Hashtag Strategy for your school, get in touch to arrange a free 15 minute consultation call.
P.S. Don’t forget to read part 1 of this blog - Our Top 7 Hashtag Tips for Schools (the ‘do’s’!)