 Now, what is a hashtag? Hashtag are basically just words that you associate your post with and or it could be your product, it could be a noun, it could be a feeling, adjective phrase, it could honestly be anything. For example, if I had a picture of fried chicken, I can put in fried chicken, I can put in that it gives me a feeling of being happy. So I put in happy or be your own champion, right? These are all hashtags that people use to put on their posts as a relevant and association with that post. Now, digging a little bit further, how does it work? It's basically used to categorize content to make it more discoverable by other people. Just imagine this as a big library, right? There's a lot of content that is in this library. How can people find your content? How can people find your posts? So it's like a giant folder that each of these posts and each of these words that people have, they can actually put their own content in this giant folder. So whenever people are searching for that specific term, they can actually find all the content in there. Now, so whenever people are clicking into these hashtags, once again, they can access the information in these folders. And all you're doing is when you're hashtagging is that you're putting your posts in this specific folder. So people who are searching for this thing can actually see it and they can actually go and scroll through basically all the content within that hashtag. So that's how hashtag works. Now, with typically any post that you make on Instagram, you can add up to 30 hashtags on a single post. And you can put your hashtag groups either in the bottom of the posts, like on the left hand side image, or to make it even cleaner, you can actually put the hashtags in the first comment as well. Either way works. So it really depends on your preference on how your aesthetics work for your Instagram account. Now, why is this important? Okay, like a lot of people think that hashtags are just like very geeky stuff. No, it actually allows you to make your business way more discoverable on this platform. Because when you use this, it's actually when you use the hashtags that are genuine, that are that are really applicable to your content. And that is useful. Then it shows Instagram that Hey, you know what, when people click on this hashtag, your posts is much more engaging. That means people are actually searching for your type of content. And then they will push your posts and they'll push this content up higher. So it's more accessible for other people to find. So that's the reason that that's what truly what better index means. That means that they better they optimize the your piece of content over other people who are not relevant. So for example, if I have a picture of fried chicken in the I'm on my post, and then I put in fried hamburger, right? And if people click into half fried hamburger, and they see a fried chicken, there's no it's not the right content. So people click out right away. And when people click out right away and it's not relevant, then Instagram would automatically know in within their own platform that Hey, you know what, this is not the right word. People are not liking the content that they found through the hashtag. And that's pushing your content lower and lower into the folder. So then that way, what's the point of hashtagging? There's no point if it's not relevant. So next up, it also helps you drive organic impression and increase your reach as well. What does that mean? That means that for every single post that you put up there on Instagram, at least having one hashtag allows your post to have 12.6% more engagement than the ones that are without what does that even mean? That means more people are willing to engage with your post. What does engaging mean? That means they'll click into it, they'll go through different hashtags within your posts. And on top of that, they might even comment because you have a hashtag. It also increases the engagement with your followers. So for example, whenever we run our campaigns, we always have our own hashtags. So then that way, people that are interested in seeing, Hey, how are people interacting with our products, right, they would click into our company's hashtag, for example, hashtag 720 suites. There's 5000 plus posts on this hashtag. Why is that the case? Because people like to share their experience with our brand. And how did they share that experience to ensure that other people see it? They add in hashtags. So then that way, whenever new customers come into our brand, what do they do? They click on our company's hashtag to see how other people are engaging with our product. And thus giving them the trust and the credibility that, Hey, you know what? This product is, is great. Let's, let's, let's buy it or let's order from them. That's the reason why hashtags are so important. Use branded hashtags to encourage interaction with your customers, exactly what I was sharing with you, right? A lot of times you would want to be able to use hashtags or have one or two hashtags that are similar to your brand name. For example, our ice cream shop 720 suites and et cetera. We use the hashtag 720 suites branded hashtags. So whenever people click on search for 720 suites, that would pop up. You would want to do the same for your hashtag groups. So to maximize the use of hashtags, we don't want to just create one or two. And yet we don't want to use 30 hashtags. The reason why we don't want to use 30 hashtags is because like what I was sharing with you earlier, Instagram is a search engine. When you put all 30 into their search engine, a lot of times I find it, it becomes buggy. It becomes like a lot of these hashtags are not indexed that it's not searchable. And what does that mean? That means that the label is not put on your post properly. And thus it doesn't show up properly. That's what it means by indexing. So that's the reason why we recommend using 25 hashtags per single post. And as you can see here, this is what it looks like as an example of a hashtag group. Now, because of the fact that we're going to be posting different pictures. For example, once again, if we're posting pictures of fried chicken and we're posting pictures of behind the scenes of us buying the chicken, or we're posting pictures of someone enjoying our product, that those are very different feelings. And those are very different contexts of content that we're creating. We can't just copy and paste the same hashtag groups for all three of these occasions or all three of these feelings that are on your posts. And that's the reason why we create different hashtag groups for different feelings. So then that way all you have to do is copy and paste these hashtag groups every single time that you have a post and making sure that it categorizes within that big bucket of that group. So for example, right here, you can see this is our hashtag group for our Bulbasaur case study that we have created. Now you can see that there's two different hashtag groups and one that is very, very bubble tea focus that has bubble tea, beautiful British Columbia bubble tea, love tea, teas, the gram, bubble love, bubble milk tea. And this is very heavy on Bulba, right? That is on the bubble tea side. Whereas the one on top, the blues one is less of a bubble tea focus because we focus more on Vancouver. Vancouver is awesome. 604, Vancouver foodie, Vancouver eats, YVR eats, Van City eats. What does that mean? That means we're catering more to influencers. We're catering more to like, Hey, when people are searching for what kind of food there is to consume in Vancouver, our stuff would pop up and it could either be our bubble tea kit or it could be someone enjoying our product. It doesn't necessarily have to be the post of a bubble tea. Whereas if I'm posting a image of my bubble tea, then I would use the bottom hashtag. So then that way it just transfers a different type of energy and a different type of feeling altogether. Now the four steps in creating the best Instagram hashtag groups. Okay, first up, do your hashtag research. This is the thing that most people trip up on. And that's reason why we're doing this. And I'm going to be introducing you to the rabbit hole method. What is that? So basically on your explore page of your Instagram account, click on the search bar on the top and click on the tags tab. You can see that we have highlighted in the red squares. Now type in your keyword specific to your location and what you want to sell. So it could be any type of keyword that you can think of right off the bat, but something that is a little bit more specific to your product. So for us, why VR eats is the one that we chose. And then you would see that there's a bunch of keywords that also popped up that has why VR eats. Then you look through the top post of why VR eats. And this is what you see on the right hand side. And you're going to see that these are the content that other people have logged under why VR eats. So what do we do? We click on one of these images, the top post, okay, there's going to be more than 800,000 posts, that's 800,000 content that people have created on why VR eats. Okay. So what do we want to do? We want to pick the top one because we want to see what other hashtags that they're using. So you can see right there, we clicked into that one and we see that Wow, this is a beautiful image. This guy must know what they're doing. Then on the bottom click on the comments. And you're going to see that they hide their comments in the first comment section to make their feed a little bit more aesthetic pleasing, right? So if you don't see their hashtag groups in their description of their posts, then most likely it will be on the first comment. And as you can see there, there's why VR eats, why VR foodies, there's Vancouver chef, Vancouver is awesome foodie. And these are all great hashtags that you can potentially use for your posts. So what do you do? You lock down the hashtags that are most relevant to you and also their search volume. Okay. So how do you find the search volume? Once again, if you just go back to step number three, you see that every time you put in a hashtag, right on the bottom of the hashtags, you see the search volume, you see that 827,000 posts, you also see that there is 8, 8.5, 8k posts for why VR eats and treats, why VR 604, there's 762 posts, why VR eats squad 90 posts, these are the search volume for your keyword. And that's really important for you to actually log down onto the Excel sheet. And once again, that Excel sheet is in the resources down below, click on the link, download that. And so then that way we can go through this together. Now, they also use funnel cake burgers, cheeseburger as hashtag. And obviously, if you're selling fried chicken or if you're selling bubble tea kits, this is not as applicable. So you don't want to include those only include hashtags that you think are relevant to your business. Okay, now go back to the search bar, click and type in the next hashtag that you find is relevant. So for example, why VR foodie sounds interesting. Now we'll click into why VR foodies and then continue on this rabbit hole method, redo the whole thing again, and add in all the hashtags and all the search volume onto your Excel sheet down below, download it from the link below and follow along. Now, these are two external tools that you could use to help you find hashtags as well. And the link I have also put into the link, the resource sheets down below, all hashtag and keyword tool. Okay, so second of all, make sure that you guys don't use overused hashtags, just imagine that you hashtag food. There's 425 million posts and content created on food. So what does that mean? That means most likely people are not going to find your content because there's 425 million of them out there. By the time you post and by the time that you have this hashtag, other people and other content would most likely be pushed up already. So you're not going to be able to fight and compete as a new account on these hashtag terms. That's the reason why we don't want to use the basic and broad hashtags. Even food porn has 250 million posts. Foodie, 175 million posts. You're not going to have your content found. And the whole point of us using hashtags is for us to be discovered by new customers. So we want to avoid these because it just makes no sense. Okay. So next up is to find your customer. It's always a good idea to use specific and locational based hashtags, even though the search volume is lower. But when you use hashtags like Boston food porn instead of just food porn, you see that with food porn, there's 250 million posts all about food porn. That is okay. That's a big pool. And when we narrow it down to Boston food porn, we see that there's only 5,000 posts. And that's actually a good thing because just because it's less demand and less content doesn't mean it's a bad thing because more chances of your posts getting found by people who are searching for this hashtag. So if you're in Vancouver, you shouldn't be promoting to someone who is in New York that has no intention of buying your product or even if they have that intention to, they can't buy your product. So why are you marketing to them? It just makes no sense. And lastly, I want you to create a group of 25 hashtags based on their search volume. So then that way we can actually diversify and actually hit different types of hashtags. So for example, we only want one popular popular hashtag, okay, that has more than a million posts. So our first one is Vancouver is awesome. That one has more than a million search and million posts that is related to Vancouver is awesome. It's okay to actually type in a very broad hashtag, because we're just placing our bet, we're just buying a lottery ticket right here, right? That's the reason why our main focus is on the bottom 500k, 100k, 50k and 20k types of hashtags. So then that way we can really focus on the locational and more specific hashtags. So this is the breakdown that you should be using for your hashtag groups. One tag that has more than a million posts, two tags that has more than 500k, eight tags with 100k and more, six tags with 50k, six tags with 20k and two tags of 10k and more based on the search volume guys. And this is our hashtag group for the case study that we created for you, bubblestore.yvr. This is a bubble tea kit that we created. And this is what we're using to cater to our first group, which is YVR foodie. We're focused on foodie mentality, right? We want to be able to target to foodies specific hashtag group. That's what we're going after. We're not going after our product, okay? If we're going after a product, then majority of these keywords would be more focused on our product of bubble tea kit and so on and so forth. But because we are focusing this specific group to cater to just foodies in general, that whenever we're posting things that we want to be appealing to these foodies so then that way they can promote for us, then we're going to use the same hashtag group. So then that way it's more discoverable by these influencers and these foodies. And of course we're going to put in what we sell as well, bubble lover, bubble tea time, bubble life. This is what those foodies would be searching for if they're looking for this type of content. Now it is your turn. Use the Instagram hashtag group document in the resources link below and create three hashtag groups that is best suited for your business based on the different feelings. So for example, our first one is YVR foodies. Second one, it could be about our bubble tea kit and third one, it could be about our marketing campaigns, right? So those are the three different feelings or different groups that we're creating based on the posts that we're deciding for and targeting, right? First up, decide the group that you want to target second create and use that rabbit hole method to find all the relevant keywords specifically for that group, add in a mix of 25 different hashtags based on volume again guys will understand that we're using hashtags based on volume and then repeat steps one to three for groups two and three.