If you want to increase your Instagram reach and impressions, you should always add relevant hashtags to your posts. With the help of hashtags, you can attract authentic followers and grow your account organically.
However, you can’t just use any random hashtags and hope to see massive growth. Instead, each hashtag should be relevant to your photo or video.
Not sure why and how you should use hashtags on Instagram? Take a look at my earlier post here.
Relevant post: How To Use Hashtags On Instagram: A Quick Guide + Free Hashtag List
So how do you find the best hashtags for your niche and your posts?
To do that, you’ll need to do hashtag research. I know it can sound difficult and time-consuming, but I’ve found a quick and effective way that I’m sharing in this article.
With this method, you’ll find hundreds of relevant hashtags in just a few minutes. Although this guide is focusing on Instagram, you can use the hashtags in any other platform, too.
What you’ll need to find the best hashtags for your post?
The process includes two parts: an easy manual step and an automatized hashtag search.
The only thing you’ll need besides the Instagram app is a hashtag research tool.
A hashtag research tool will automatically find related hashtags in a matter of seconds or minutes. You could obviously collect hashtags manually by scrolling through Instagram, but you’ll end up spending a long time and still not find as many hashtags as you could with an automatic tool.
I recommend a free online tool called Display Purposes (https://displaypurposes.com). You can probably use any other tool too to follow the steps, but Display Purposes is quick and very simple to use. Plus, did I mention already that it’s free!
Step 1: Find 1-3 relevant hashtags manually.
You can add anything between 1 and 30 hashtags to your posts. Obviously, coming up with 30 (or even 10) relevant hashtags can be challenging.
But finding one or a couple of hashtags isn’t that hard, right?
That’s what you should start with.
Find something that is directly related to your post (adding unrelated hashtags is completely useless!). For example:
- If you post a recipe photo, you could use #food, #recipe, or something more specific to the food.
- Or when publishing an outfit post, you could start with #outfitoftheday, #outfit and something specific to your outfit (e.g., #denim or #suit)
An excellent place to find the initial hashtags is Instagram itself. When you use the Instagram search, hashtags will be suggested to you.
Use the Instagram search bar to find popular hashtags 
At top of a hashtag page, you’ll find related hashtags
Tap one of these, and you’ll see related hashtags at the top.
Choose 1-3 of these hashtags and advance to step 2 to find hundreds of relevant hashtags quickly and easily.
Step 2: Type in the first hashtags
Now that you have a few hashtags figured out, it’s time to begin the search.
- Head over to https://displaypurposes.com
- Type in the hashtags you found in step 1 in the search box at the top of the site
- Change the limit from 30 to infinite (∞) to find as many hashtags as possible.
After a few seconds, you’ll be displayed with related hashtags. Now, you could already have enough hashtags to get started, but to find even more relevant hashtags, move on to step 3.
Step 3: Repeat the search
In step 2, you probably found about 30 hashtags. The number varies a bit, so you could have more or much less.
Anyhow, with this next trick, you’ll find tens or even hundreds of new hashtags in just a couple of minutes.
Before proceeding, go through the hashtags, you found in step 2 and ignore anything irrelevant or regional (e.g., another language).
- Copy all but irrelevant hashtags found in step 2
- Paste the hashtags into the search bar
This search could take a while and slow down your browser slightly because there’s more information to process. However, it shouldn’t take more than one or two minutes.
After the search is done, you should now have plenty of hashtags (over 100) to use on your posts. Once again, you should go through the hashtags before actually using them to be sure about the quality of them.
If you would like to find even more hashtags, you can repeat the process again (and again). The search could take a long time, though, so your browser could freeze. To avoid this, you could split the hashtags into several searches.
Start growing your Instagram account with relevant hashtags
If you followed the three easy steps, you probably have over 100 hashtags that you could use.
You still need to choose the best hashtags for each of your posts manually. But with the research, you have many hashtags to choose from.
To sum up, the process is straightforward:
- Find 1-3 relevant hashtags to your post or niche
- Copy & paste the hashtag(s) into the search bar on Display Purposes
- Change the limit to infinity (∞) and copy all the hashtags
- Paste all the hashtags from step 3 to the search bar
- Repeat the process as many times as you want to find more hashtags