Announcing Hashtag Manager: A New Tool to Help You Save and Organize Hashtags for Instagram

Today we’re launching Hashtag Manager to help you save and organize hashtags for Instagram. Get started with Buffer for Instagram here.

Over the years, hashtags have become an important part of any Instagram marketing strategy. By adding hashtags to your content you can help your posts to reach new audiences, boost engagement, and pick up new followers.

But there’s a problem.

One thing we’ve heard from customers time and time again is how difficult it can be to organize, group and save hashtags.

Some people have groups of hashtags saved on their phone ready to copy and paste to each post before publishing. While others manually re-type hashtags every time they schedule a post. This isn’t a smooth process, and, as many people have told us, it can be time consuming.

We’ve experienced this first hand while growing our own Instagram account too. So we thought it was high time we created a better way to save and manage hashtags.

Create and save groups of hashtags to use in your Instagram posts

With Hashtag Manager Buffer Premium and Business customers will now be able to create and save groups of hashtags directly within the Buffer composer.

“Since we could see that customers were primarily using our Instagram first comment feature for hashtags, I wanted Hashtag Manager to feel like a natural extension of that experience,” explains Lauren Chilcote, Senior Product Designer here at Buffer.

The ability to create groups means you can have numerous sets of hashtags based on different segments of your audience or the target audience of your posts. For example, a sports clothing and sneaker brand could have groups for various audience segments:

RunnersGym enthusiastsSneaker fans

Experimenting with different hashtag variations could be a great way to unlock additional growth on your Instagram account, and mixing up your hashtags also helps you to stick to Instagram’s best practices (of not using exactly the same hashtags on every single post).

Whatever your approach, Hashtag Manager helps you build a library of options and get more reach for every post. Not to mention you can now retire your old hashtag docs and notes.

“We’re hoping to lift the burden of managing many sets of hashtags from a scattered approach with notes and Excel Sheets to a space that lives right next to where you create your posts,” says Suprasanna Mishra, Product Manager here at Buffer.

Schedule hashtags to appear in the first comment to keep your post captions tidy

Not only does Hashtag Manager enable you to streamline your Instagram posting strategy, it also allows you to keep your captions tidy and place hashtags in your first comment.

This is a hugely popular strategy across Instagram:

With Buffer Publish, you can now directly schedule your Instagram photo and video posts, including hashtags in the first comment to enhance the potential reach of everything you publish.

“With the release of Instagram first comment, we saw that nearly every comment was a group of hashtags. This aligned with what we heard through research — that customers were saving groups of hashtags in notes and documents to copy and paste into the composer. I was chomping at the bit to streamline that workflow,” says Lauren.

“My hope is that Hashtag Manager will help our customers focus their efforts on crafting great content and maximize the number of people they reach with each and every post.”

Lauren ChilcoteSenior Product Designer, Buffer

How to get started with Hashtag Manager

Hashtag Manager is now available to all Buffer Premium and Business customers. To get started, simply open up the Buffer composer, select your Instagram account and click the hashtag symbol in the top right corner. Clicking on this symbol will open Hashtag Manager.

Bonus: Use Shop Grid to add a product page link to your post, and your shoppable page will automatically update with the latest content.

Creating a new hashtag group

You can create a new hashtag group in just a few clicks. To get started, click the ‘Create Hashtag Group’ button:

Enter a name for your group and add the hashtags you’d like to include. Towards the bottom of the content area, you’ll be able to see how many hashtags you have remaining, so that you don’t exceed Instagram’s limit of 30 hashtags per post. Once you’re happy with your hashtags, click Save Hashtag Group.

Adding a hashtag group to your first comment

All of your created hashtag groups will appear within Hashtag Manager as you open it up. To add a group of hashtags to your first comment, hover over the group and click Insert.

You are able to insert multiple groups, but keep an eye on the hashtag counter to make sure you don’t exceed Instagram’s limit of 30 per post.

“We want to let customers spend more time creating and serving their valuable content and less time managing the processes around it.”

Suprasanna MishraProduct Manager, Buffer

Coming soon: A lighter-weight version will also be coming soon to the Publish mobile apps enabling you to insert saved hashtag groups on mobile.

If your business is using Instagram, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the burden of grouping relevant hashtags, and then pasting or re-typing them into every post manually. With Hashtag Manager, you can de-clutter your processes, and have confidence that every post you publish to Instagram will have the best chance of breaking through.

To get started streamlining your Instagram hashtag strategy, head this way.