How to do hashtag research for Instagram, one tag at a time
How do you do hashtag research for Instagram? Collect a long list of candidate tags for your niche, then measure each one on the same four things: how often people post under it, how much response those posts get, who is posting, and which other tags travel with it. Keep the tags that pass, write down why, and repeat the check every month. The whole routine works with nothing but the app and a spreadsheet. This guide walks through it, shows what to record, and then covers how to speed it up once the list is longer than you want to scroll by hand.
What hashtag research is for
Research answers one question: which tags will put my post in front of people who care about it? A tag that is popular somewhere else does not answer that. A list of “best hashtags” is somebody else’s measurement of somebody else’s audience, which is why building a set instead of copying one works better than pasting.
Research is different from picking. Picking is the last step, when you choose a handful for one post. Research is the earlier, slower job of finding out what each candidate tag actually carries, so that the picking takes a minute.
The routine, step by step
- Write down who you want to reach. One sentence: “home bakers in Leeds who want to improve their sourdough”. Every later decision refers back to it.
- Collect thirty to fifty candidate tags. Sources are listed in the next section. Do not judge yet.
- Measure each candidate on the four checks below. Put the results in one row per tag.
- Cut the list. Drop tags that are empty, off-niche, full of people selling to each other, or banned or restricted.
- Sort what is left into tiers: a few broad tags, a middle band, and narrow niche tags.
- Save the sheet with today’s date. Tags drift, so the date is part of the result.
Where candidate tags come from
| Source | What it gives you | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram’s own search suggestions | Tags people actually type | Anything with few posts |
| Your best-performing past posts | Tags you already use that worked | New ideas |
| Posts from peers in your niche | The tags your real neighbours use | Whether those posts did well |
| Captions of posts you admire in your niche | Variants of a tag you already trust | Tags from a different phrasing of the same idea |
| Your customers’ own posts | The words buyers use, which are often not the trade’s words | Customers who never tag |
The words your customers use beat the words your industry uses. A florist writes about “arrangements”; a buyer searches “birthday flowers”. Start your list from the buyer’s side.
The four checks
For each candidate, open the hashtag page and look at the recent posts rather than the top ones. Top posts show what won last year. Recent posts show what you are about to join.
| Check | What to look at | A good sign | A warning sign |
|---|---|---|---|
| How busy | How fast the recent grid turns over | A steady trickle of fresh posts | Hundreds of new posts a minute, or none for weeks |
| How responsive | Likes and comments on ordinary recent posts, skipping the best one | Real comments from real people | Emoji strings, or only the top post has any response |
| Who posts | The authors of the recent posts | Customers and peers | Resellers, bots, or only people selling the same thing you sell |
| What travels with it | The other tags in those posts | Tags you would also use | Unrelated tags, which means the tag belongs to a different community |
A few rules keep the judgment honest:
- Ignore the single best post. One viral post pulls the picture up. Look at what a typical post gets.
- Compare tags on the same day. A tag checked on a holiday weekend looks busier than it is.
- Read the comments. Ten real replies mean more than a hundred generic ones.
- Check the language and the place. A tag can be about your subject and belong to another country or another price bracket.
What to record
A sheet you can reuse is the real output of research. One row per tag, with columns like these:
| Column | Example entry |
|---|---|
| Tag | #sourdoughstarter |
| Date checked | 2026-10-05 |
| How busy | Several fresh posts an hour |
| Typical response | A few dozen likes, a handful of comments |
| Who posts | Home bakers, a few shops |
| Travels with | #breadbaking, #homebaker |
| Tier | Middle |
| Keep? | Yes |
The date column matters most. Without it, next quarter you will not know whether a “keep” is current or stale.
Doing hashtag research for Instagram faster
The manual routine is fine for twenty tags. It gets slow when you want to compare fifty, repeat it every month, or hand the reasoning to someone else. The slow parts are the scrolling and keeping the counts consistent from tag to tag.
That is the job Hashtag Ninja is built for. You describe the question in a sentence, for example “I run a specialty coffee roastery in Melbourne, which hashtags are worth posting under and how busy are they?”, and the free planner turns it into a collection plan: which tags to look at, how many posts to pull, over what window, and the assumptions it made, so you can correct a wrong one before relying on it. Planning needs no account.
Running the plan is the next step. According to the hashtag research tool page, the report it writes covers posts per day under a tag over the window you chose, median and top-decile likes so you can see the spread rather than one average, the tags that most often appear alongside it, and when people post. The posts behind the numbers come as a CSV, so you can check the work.
To be straight about where it stands as of October 2026: the planner is free, and running a plan is open to anyone signed in, on the 500 free rows an account gets every 30 days. Buying more rows is not possible yet, and the pricing page says what the paid plan will cost once it opens.
Manual research compared with a planned run
| Task | By hand in the app | With a plan and report |
|---|---|---|
| Choose which tags to check | From memory and peers | Listed in the plan from your sentence |
| Measure how busy a tag is | Watch the grid | A posts-per-day figure over a window |
| See the spread of responses | Eyeball a few posts | Median and top-decile likes |
| Find companion tags | Read caption after caption | Ranked by how often they co-occur |
| Repeat next month | Start again | Re-run the same brief |
| Show your working | Screenshots | A CSV of the posts |
Neither way sees private accounts. Instagram keeps their posts off hashtag pages, so every method describes only the public part of a niche.
When the manual way is enough
Skip the extra tooling if:
- you post a few times a week and only need a fresh set for each post;
- your niche is small and you already know which tags the community uses;
- you are new to this and want to learn what a healthy tag looks like before trusting any tool’s summary.
Doing it by hand once teaches you what to look for, which makes any report you read later easier to judge. If you need a more careful read on whether tags still help at all, do hashtags still work on Instagram covers how to test that on your own account.
A routine you can keep
- Once a month, refresh your candidate list from customers’ posts and peers.
- Re-measure your keepers and any new candidates on the same four checks.
- Update the sheet and its date.
- Before each post, pick a few from the sheet instead of researching from scratch. How many hashtags to use explains how few you need.
Hashtag research for Instagram is mostly the habit of measuring before you choose. A tag you can explain in one sentence is worth more than ten you copied.