You will be able to choose a few accurate hashtags and keywords without relying on them for reach.
You have probably seen a post with a caption of two lines followed by thirty hashtags: #love #instagood #food #foodie #yummy #singapore #sgfood #cake and on and on. Somebody told the account owner that more hashtags mean more reach. The post has a handful of likes.
Hashtags have a reputation as a reach button. They are better understood as a label. This lesson shows you how to choose a few that describe your post accurately, and why that matters more than how many you use.
A hashtag is a word or phrase with a # in front of it, which most platforms turn into a link to other posts with the same tag. Platforms also read the ordinary words in your caption, your on-screen text and sometimes your audio, as lesson 6.1 explained. Both hashtags and keywords help the platform understand what a post is about and who might want to see it.
So think of them as telling the platform, and anyone searching, "this post is about cream cakes for children's parties in Singapore." The platform still decides how far to show the post based on how viewers respond, as you learned in lesson 1.1. Hashtags do not override that. A post that people scroll past will not travel far whatever its tags say.
The platforms' own creator guidance tends to describe hashtags this way, as a way to help people find and understand content. The exact advice changes, so check the help pages of the platform you use.
A broad, popular tag like #food or #cake is attached to an enormous number of posts. Your post becomes one more drop in that pool, shown to nobody in particular. It tells the platform almost nothing about who your post is for.
A specific tag is far more useful. #birthdaycakesg, #egglesscake or a tag for your type of product tells the platform and the searcher exactly what the post is about. Fewer people search it, but the ones who do are looking for what you make.
Mei Ling replaced her list of twenty broad tags with four: one for custom birthday cakes in Singapore, one for children's party ideas, one for Punggol, and one for her own business name. Her reach did not collapse, and the comments started coming from parents rather than from accounts that seemed to like every post they saw.
An accurate tag is also an honest one. Do not add a trending tag that has nothing to do with your post in the hope of borrowing its traffic. It brings the wrong viewers, and as lesson 3.1 showed, the wrong viewers teach the feed the wrong things about your account.
If your customers live in one area, location and community tags can help. A neighbourhood or estate name, such as Punggol, Tampines or Toa Payoh, connects you to people searching locally. Many platforms also let you add a location to the post itself, which can do a similar job.
Singapore niches work the same way. A tuition centre might use tags for PSLE or for a particular level. A modest fashion seller might use tags her buyers use for modest workwear in Singapore. Look at which tags the active accounts in your category use, and which tags real buyers use in their own posts, before you settle on yours.
Check each tag before you use it. Tap it and look at the posts it shows. If they are spam, off-topic or nothing like your post, choose a different one.
You will see confident advice about the perfect number of hashtags: always use three, always use thirty, never use more than five. These numbers change from one article to the next and often contradict each other. Platforms adjust how they treat hashtags over time, and what worked for one account a year ago may not hold for yours today.
Treat any such number as a guess and test on your own account instead. A simple approach is to start with three to five specific, accurate tags per post, keep that steady for a month, and then look at your analytics. Some platforms show how many views came from hashtags or search. If changing your tags makes no difference you can see, put your effort into hooks and scripts, which do.
Farah tested this herself. For a month she used three specific tags per post, then the next month she added ten broad ones. She saw no clear difference in reach between the two months, so she went back to three and spent the saved minutes on her captions. Her test is one example, and yours may come out differently.
For each video, ask what the post is about, who it is for and where they are. Choose a tag or keyword for each answer, check that it is used for posts like yours, and stop there.
In the activity you will pick three to five specific hashtags or keywords for your video and write one sentence on why each one fits.
Pick three to five specific hashtags or keywords for your video and write one sentence on why each fits.
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