Top 100 Trending Instagram Hashtags (and what people won’t tell you)

On this page, you will find the Top 100 trending Instagram hashtags.

Something that we want you to notice is that these numbers will change every second on Instagram, therefore, you should take them as estimates.

On the other hand, we will be updating this list as many times as possible, so except the hashtags to change as we do it.

Keep reading for tips and tricks on how to get the most engagement possible out of these hashtags and other interesting things we have noticed throughout the years.

Plus a bonus experiment.

Top 30 Instagram Trending Hashtags

Top 30-60 Instagram Trending Hashtags

Top 60-90 Instagram Trending Hashtags

Top 90-100 Instagram Trending Hashtags

Why have we separated these hashtags into groups of 30?

Many people ask themselves this question every time they see this type of list.

The answer is simple. If you haven’t noticed, Instagram only allows a total of 30 hashtags per posts.

That means that if you try adding more than that, you will get an error. 

We do it as a way to make it simple for you.

Many of the feedback that we see people giving to other websites, is that is too hard to copy and paste the hashtags into their posts because they have listed them in a table, meaning they have to go one by one if the formatting is too complicated.

With us, you can simply press/click the copy button, and you are all set.

How should you be using these trending Instagram hashtags?

You shouldn’t be using them on every post.

Since not all of them will be relevant to what you are posting, or what your brand is all about, one thing you can do is use them randomly.

This means that you will be using targeted hashtags and top trending at the same time.

You have two options…

• 1- You can mix them, meaning that in the same Instagram post, you will have 15 niche-relevant hashtags and 15 trending Instagram hashtags.
• 2- You can have 30 niche-relevant on one posts, and then on another post, 30 trending Instagram hashtags, and so on.

You can experiment and see for yourself what works and what not. See what gives you the best result.

This YouTube video from visualrev will give you a very interesting insight on this very specific question.  

Why are hashtags important?

Hashtags are a way of seeing other posts or users on Instagram, and as well, letting others discover you.

They are important to grow your business, brand, or page, in a sense that they put you out there for others to see what you do.

Let’s imagine you don’t use hashtags…

Then only those who follow you will see what you post. That’s the only problem, and where hashtags come very handy. They act as the wire that will connect you to future followers, clients, etc.

With Instagram implementing a feature that lets you follow hashtags, now you don’t only show up to those that look for the hashtag manually, but if your post is good enough and has a good engagement after being posted, it might appear on other user’s timeline that follow the hashtag.

What makes a good hashtag?

A good hashtag is one that is related to your industry and that it’s being used enough for others to actually look at what you do.

Hashtags can be generalized or very specific, the best thing to do is to experiment and be consistent with your social media until you find what works for your page.

You might realize that certain hashtags bring more followers, while others bring more likes or comments, then what you should do is optimize them so there is a balance, or improve them so what you really want to accomplish is being accomplished.

The more specific hashtags you use, the greater your chances are to grow an audience that is interested in what you do.

The last thing you want is having 100k followers and be getting 10 likes on your pictures. Trust me.

Important: Check your analytics. It’s very important to know what’s working or hurting your social media campaigns. Don’t use hashtags that no one is following or using, and don’t post content that appears to be not working.

Should you use hashtags in every post?

It really depends on what your end goal is. Are you selling a product? Are you promoting other people’s content? Or are you just promoting yourself?

Too many hashtags can often be seen as spam. Luckily for you, our site separates them into relevant-only hashtags. Now we are talking.

Let’s say you post a picture of a cat. You don’t want hashtags like: #dogsofinstagram, #dog, #puppy, #dogowner.

This is the kind of spam we talk about.

As long as you always post hashtags that are relevant to your content, then you will be fine.

Why use trending Instagram hashtags?

Trending Instagram hashtags are what people are talking about the most. They have their advantages and disadvantages (see pros and cons below), but they will definitely put you out there.

Now…

1. Trending hashtags will make things more simple – They will help you reach your targeted audience, as well as your targeted audience hopefully find you, as we said. They will serve as an easy way to promote your content on Instagram.
2. Trending hashtags are getting more attention – They simply grow like a snowball. You will see even more platforms implementing the use of hashtags to let their users find content easily. Even big brands use them to heavily promote their products on social media. AXE for example, with #AXEPressYourself.

But there should be a problem at some point, right?

Will you get spammed for using trending hashtags?

As so many Instagram users are using them, you will see two things happening:

• 1- Your posts will get disappear faster from the “recent” tab and your chances of being featured on the “top” tab for any of these trending hashtags will be very low, maybe none.
• 2- You will or might get spammed.

Let’s talk about number two. Other people are also trying to grow their pages, therefore, they will use them as well, and maybe even interact with you at some point (is this spam?).

Don’t get uncomfortable when you see comments like:

Hey, follow my page for (insert any niche) content.

Love your content, let’s network.

Wow, nice post. Follow me for the dankest memes (insert emojis).

They are trying to gain followers, likes, and comments, but they do it with their “copy and paste” comments. 

You don’t have to block them or report them, but simply have in mind that this could happen.

Interact with them if what they say is relevant to you.

You are using hashtags, people will expect you to want to connect with them.

Trying doing it if it seems genuine.

As I said before, test the waters and use them every other day, but don’t rely on them all the time.

What are the cons of using trending Instagram hashtags?

As mentioned before, using trending Instagram hashtags have many advantages and disadvantages. Let’s talk about them.

Cons of using trending Instagram hashtags:

• Your post will disappear faster:

Since many people are using these trending Instagram hashtags, a huge flow of posts will be added every minute, meaning that eventually yours will get lost.

This could be bad if what you are trying to do is get more people to see your content.

• You will get spammed by others:

Is not necessarily a bad spam, but rather people telling you how good your picture is, and how they want you to follow them and see their content.

These comments are generally copied and pasted throughout the whole app, so somethings they won’t even make sense.

Say you post a photo of your camera gear, and then this guy tells you:

Lovely people. Check out my page.

• The followers you gain won’t be interested in what you do:

Just as how it sounds…

Yes, you will be able to gain followers, but they won’t care too much about you at all.

They will be there for just the number, and a follow back.

Don’t expect them to comment or like your future posts.

• You could be seen as spammy to the ones that are legitimately following you already:

If you have a fan base or people that like what you do, then after using too many of these non-related hashtags, some people might get uncomfortable.

There’s really not a good reason for it, but they just dislike it.

Again, as we mention on every one of our pages, you should include the hashtags in your comments section so your posts look more professional, and the hashtags will keep working as if they were on the captions.

• You won’t stand out:

There might be people or brands that are known for any of these hashtags, for instance: #iphoneonly

This is obviously an Apple Inc. hashtag.

So it won’t make sense to use it that much after all.

Try creating your own, or getting known for one that hasn’t been “taken” before.

What are the pros of using trending Instagram hashtags?

Pros of using trending Instagram hashtags:

• You will have a huge short exposure depending on the hashtags you use

Just as we mentioned above that your posts will disappear faster, we also think that this short exposure could be perfect from time to time. There’s nothing bad about that.

But as always, don’t depend on this to get people to see what you do.

• You will get many likes, and even more, if you are featured in the “top” section

If you get lucky enough to be featured on the “top” section of a popular hashtag, you will experience a good amount of people liking your post.

Since everyone that visits that tab will see your post as one of the first ones, they will all like it as the first thing they do.

Pro tip: Now that you know that this could happen if you get lucky enough, be prepared by just posting high-quality stuff.

For example: Let’s take a look at how the #love section looks like.

Can you see how many likes the first post got? Is crazy.

Now, you might think, that whoever posted that has 100 K followers or something like that.

Let’see the hashtags they used and how many followers they have.

As you can see, the first one is #love. We haven’t tested it, but maybe putting your main hashtag first is a great practice? Who knows.

This screenshot was taken 10 minutes after the photo was posted, and it already has 3,212 likes.

Remember that we didn’t check how the other hashtags worked for this user. These results were also possible with the help of the other hashtags as well.

Now see how many  people follow this account:

At the time this last screenshot was taken, this account had only 3 followers.

So, as you can see, you could receive massive exposure by being featured in top posts section.

As an interesting fact to share, by the time we edited these picture, this is what happened to the photo and the #love section.

The photo we talked about moved from position 1 to position 9, the number of likes increased to 3,550 and the comments remained as 0.

Something to notice is how the total amount of posts moved from 1,317,704,076 to 1,316,710,246.

That’s exactly 6,170 posts in less than approximately 25 minutes (remember we talked about this).

And after about 45 minutes:

The post is no longer part of the “top posts” section, and it is just in the most recent part of the hashtag #love tab.

Let’s move on to our next pro.

• Your engagement will shortly improve

As we saw before, the post that this random account published didn’t get many comments, in fact just one guy saying “Charming” commented after one hour.

Likes seem to be what one only gets after using one of these hashtags and getting featured as a “top” post.

If you are able to dominate one of these hashtags, meaning people know you for one of them, then your growth could be even higher

Now, if you can get your brand to dominate one of these 100 trending Instagram hashtags then people might even start tagging you in every post they publish.

Imagine for a second how this might positively affect your brand.

If people are doing the marketing for you, you won’t even need to worry about it that much.

• Is a great way to balance your hashtags campaigns

Let’s say you always post using our niche-related hashtags.

If you also want to, every now and then, test how these hashtags also work for you.

That’s what we mean by balancing your campaigns.

In other words, expand your reach on Instagram.

Based on 200 Instagram accounts that we studied after using trending Instagram hashtags for a week, these were the results we got:

You can see that every account felt a 100% increase of like from non-followers, these also got proved with our #love mini-experiment.

Now…

The account we tested, as far as we know, posted this as its first post, and they simply got lucky.

Imagine doing that for a week, now these percentages start to make sense.

At least 21% of them received comments from people that didn’t follow them first and never did. 29% gained at least 10 followers, and some others even 100s depending on how often they posted.

And as a bad thing, 46% of them experienced spam (people trying to get followers as well).

How to use hashtags for your business, brand, or project?

The very best thing you can do is create a unique hashtag.

It has to be something that has never been used before, that way you will be the only know account for that hashtag. Make people post using that specific hashtag.

You can create contests, or giveaways, in which you give something to a random person using your hashtag.

This is a very interesting way to create loyalty and engagement with your followers.

Let’s take a look at how Amazon.com is doing it on Instagram.

As you can tell, no other account is using that as their own hashtag, and if they do, it will be worthless.

Amazon obviously “owns this hashtag”, and anyone posting content using this one hashtag in specific is contributing to the company’s campaign, and engaging with them.

Here is the full list of the hashtags with their proper numbers (this list will be constantly updated):

#love – 1,3 B

#instagood – 778,6 M

#photooftheday – 529,3 M

#fashion – 513,5 M

#beautiful – 481,0 M

#happy – 440,6 M

#like4like – 439,3 M

#cute – 430,9 M

#tbt – 423,6 M

#followme – 407,4 M

#picoftheday – 396,5 M

#follow – 384,0 M

#art – 365,0 M

#me – 354,6 M

#selfie – 344,7 M

#instadaily – 333,3 M

#summer – 331,3 M

#repost – 323,9 M

#nature – 320,3 M

#friends – 315,4 M

#girl – 301,1 M

#style – 300,1 M

#fun – 295,4 M

#travel – 285,4 M

#smile – 275,8 M

#food – 274,9 M

#instalike – 271,5 M

#likeforlike – 268,5 M

#fitness – 266,6 M

#family – 263,7 M

#photography – 249,1 M

#follow4follow – 245,9 M

#beauty – 236,9 M

#instagram – 233,1 M

#life – 230,8 M

#igers – 230,7 M

#nofilter – 224,4 M

#amazing – 218,7 M

#tagsforlikes – 218,6 M

#instamood – 203,4 M

#photo – 202,6 M

#music – 194,6 M

#sun – 188,8 M

#followforfollow – 188,5 M

#vscocam – 186,2 M

#ootd – 185,0 M

#beach – 182,5 M

#dog – 175,6 M

#sunset – 173,3 M

#makeup – 172,9 M

#sky – 169,4 M

#l4l – 167,7 M

#vsco – 167,7 M

#foodporn – 160,0 M

#f4f – 158,0 M

#hair – 150,9 M

#model – 150,8 M

#pretty – 146,2 M

#cat – 144,7 M

#motivation – 143,5 M

#swag – 135,8 M

#girls – 133,4 M

#baby – 132,5 M

#gym – 130,9 M

#cool – 130,1 M

#party – 129,4 M

#fit – 125,5 M

#lol – 123,8 M

#funny – 123,3 M

#instapic – 123,3 M

#healthy – 120,8 M

#yummy – 115,6 M

#night – 113,0 M

#hot – 111,8 M

#workout – 110,4 M

#black – 108,2 M

#pink – 108,0 M

#blue – 106,6 M

#blackandwhite – 106,2 M

#work – 105,0 M

#instacool – 90,80 M

#red – 90,77 M

#sweet – 90,50 M

#throwback – 88,83 M

#followback – 88,27 M

#birthday – 88,09 M

#instafollow – 87,63 M

#instalove – 87,55 M

#iphoneonly – 86,69 M

#my – 82,33 M

#awesome – 81,95 M

#new – 81,41 M

#webstagram – 79,54 M

#likes – 78,38 M

#nice – 78,30 M

#iphonesia – 76,14 M

#igdaily – 75,16 M

#eyes – 73,83 M

#instasize – 70,12 M

#wcw – 61,27 M