The short version: Sort your hashtags into five labelled buckets (brand, niche, community, location, content type), keep 30 to 50 hashtags per bucket in a note or spreadsheet you can copy from in ten seconds, and refresh a third of them every couple of months. Hashtags matter less than they did in 2018, but a tidy system still saves you real time and stops you posting the same tired 30 tags on every single post.
Why this is worth sorting out
I spent years typing hashtags into Instagram captions like I was throwing spaghetti at a wall. #entrepreneur #smallbusiness #marketing #girlboss, whatever felt vaguely relevant that day. It took roughly four minutes a post, and I had no idea if any of it worked because I never tracked it against anything.
Then in 2019, during a stretch when I was posting five times a week to keep my agency visible, I sat down on a Sunday and built a proper hashtag library. It took two hours. It saved me, conservatively, ten minutes a post from then on. Over a year of daily posting, that is roughly 60 hours back. That is the entire point of sorting your hashtags: not magic reach, just time you get back.
The five-bucket system
Forget one giant list of 200 hashtags you scroll through hoping something jumps out. Split them into buckets by purpose, then pull 5 to 8 from each bucket depending on the post.
- Brand hashtags, your own name or campaign tag, used every time so people can find your archive. Mine is #LilachBullock.
- Niche hashtags, specific to your industry. For me that is #AIforsmallbusiness, #digitalmarketingtips, #marketingstrategy, not the generic #marketing which has over 300 million posts and no chance of you being seen in it.
- Community hashtags, tags tied to a group or event, like #Forbescouncils or a conference hashtag when I am speaking somewhere.
- Location hashtags, useful if you serve a region, #UKsmallbusiness or #Londonbusiness for anyone building a local client base.
- Content-type hashtags, describing the format itself, #podcastclip, #reelsoftheday, #howtoguide.
Five buckets, five to eight tags pulled from each, gives you a fresh-feeling set of roughly 25 to 30 hashtags without you ever staring at a blank screen wondering what to type.
Building your master list, step by step
- Open a blank note or spreadsheet. I use a simple Google Sheet with five tabs, one per bucket.
- For each bucket, write down every relevant hashtag you can think of in ten minutes. Do not filter yet, just dump.
- Search each one in Instagram's own search bar and note the post count next to it. Anything under 10,000 posts is often too small to reach anyone; anything over 5 million is often too crowded to ever surface in.
- Keep the middle ground, roughly 20,000 to 500,000 posts, as your sweet spot for niche hashtags. Keep a handful of the huge ones too, they still help occasionally, just do not rely on them.
- Aim for 30 to 50 hashtags per bucket once you are done filtering. That gives you rotation room so you are not repeating the exact same set every post, which some accounts have flagged as looking spammy.
- Label the tab clearly and date it, so in three months you know when you last touched it.
Where to store them
You have three realistic options, and I have used all three over the years.
The Notes app on your phone works fine if you are a one-person operation posting occasionally. Type each bucket as a separate note, titled clearly, and copy-paste from there. Zero cost, zero setup, but it gets messy fast once you are managing more than one account.
A spreadsheet is what I use now. One sheet, five tabs, updated every couple of months. It is searchable, shareable with a virtual assistant, and version-controlled if you use Google Sheets, so you can see what changed and when.
Instagram's own saved caption templates, inside the app when you are creating a post, work if you want zero extra apps but they are clunky to edit and you cannot see all your buckets side by side.
Scheduling tools like Later or Hootsuite let you save hashtag sets and drop them straight into scheduled posts, which is the fastest method if you already pay for one of those tools for scheduling anyway. I would not buy a tool purely for hashtag storage though, a free spreadsheet does the job.
The rotation habit that keeps this useful
A hashtag list you build once and never touch again is worse than useless, it is stale and Instagram's own guidance has repeatedly nudged people away from copy-pasting identical blocks of tags on every post. Set a recurring calendar reminder, mine is the first Monday of every second month, to review each bucket. Swap out roughly a third of the hashtags: remove any that have ballooned past 5 million posts since you added them, add two or three new ones you have noticed competitors or clients using well.
This takes 20 minutes every two months. That is the whole maintenance cost.
The bit most guides on this topic skip
Here is what I will say plainly, because most posts about hashtag strategy will not: hashtags carry a fraction of the weight they did in 2017 and 2018, and Instagram itself has said publicly that its ranking now leans far more heavily on search-style keywords in your caption and alt text than on hashtag blocks tucked at the bottom of a post. I still sort mine. I still recommend you sort yours. But I want you to know that the return on this exercise is time saved and tidiness, not a guaranteed reach boost.
I tested this on my own account across three months in 2023: identical content, identical posting times, one set with 25 carefully sorted hashtags, one set with just my brand hashtag and nothing else. The difference in reach was under 4 percent. The posts that spiked were the ones where I had rewritten the caption to answer a real question someone might type into search, not the ones with the fanciest hashtag set. So build your system, because it saves you real time and stops chaotic last-minute typing. Just do not expect it to rescue a post with a weak caption or a boring first line. It will not.
If your wider content strategy needs more than a hashtag tidy-up, that is usually a sign the problem is the plan behind the posting, not the tags themselves, and that is a conversation worth having with someone who does this for a living rather than another spreadsheet.
A quick worked example
Say I am posting a reel about AI tools for small business owners. From my buckets I would pull: #LilachBullock (brand), #AIforsmallbusiness #AItoolsforbusiness #smallbusinessAI (niche, mid-size, checked at around 40,000 to 90,000 posts each), #UKsmallbusiness (location), #reelsoftheday (content type), and maybe #Forbescouncils if the content ties to something I have written there. That is nine hashtags, pulled in under a minute because the buckets already exist, rather than 30 generic ones typed from memory under time pressure.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
Nine well-chosen tags will outperform 30 lazy ones every time, and it takes a fraction of the effort once the system exists.
Related reading: best friend hashtags.
Related reading: how to search instagram by location.
If you want your own numbers, use the free hashtag checker.
Related reading: block certain words on instagram.
Frequently asked questions
How many hashtags should I use on Instagram in 2026?
Instagram allows up to 30 per post, but most accounts see just as good results with 8 to 15 well-chosen, mid-size hashtags rather than maxing out the limit with generic ones.
Should hashtags go in the caption or the first comment?
Either works, Instagram has confirmed both are treated the same for reach, so put them wherever keeps your caption looking cleanest to a human reader.
How often should I update my hashtag lists?
Review each bucket every six to eight weeks, swapping out roughly a third of the tags so you are not repeating the identical block on every single post.
Do hashtags still help with reach at all?
A little, mostly for discoverability within a niche, but caption wording, alt text, and consistent posting now carry far more weight than hashtag choice alone, so treat hashtags as a small useful habit, not your main growth strategy.
