How To Use Top Fitness Hashtags to Grow Your Following and Engagement
Use top fitness hashtags to grow your client base, your following, and overall social media engagement for your personal training business. In this article, we will talk about how to find hashtags, how often to use the same set of tags, where to place them, who to target with them, and how to get in touch with social trends through hashtags.
The simple pound sign and a word or two to follow make for a powerful tool for growth. Hashtags are so beyond popular these days that younger generations would not associate them with actually dialing a number. Try not to feel old because of that…
What you should try to do, instead, is think about all the ways hashtags can grow your following and attract new users who you can convert into paying clients.
Where do I even use the top fitness hashtags I find?
Hashtags are usable on just about every social media platform there is. It only makes sense because they prove to be a valuable tool for locating and sharing specific content around a topic. Muddling through content using a couple of keywords these days can be difficult without tags to narrow searches. Heck! We even use tags in blogs to boost SEO ranking and findability.
The placement of hashtags on social media platforms differs in efficacy. Hashtags work better, strategically, on some platforms as opposed to others, so let’s get into where you should post your tags and why.
Instagram hashtags are vital to successful Instagram content. That is, if you define success on Instagram under the KPIs likes, follows, reach, shares, comments, and other engagements.
Wait! First, let’s make sure that you have your Instagram set as a business account so that you can track all of these KPIs for each post you share. Following these metrics in detail through Instagram Insights helps tremendously in understanding what content is performing better and why.
Instagram Insights help you narrow down what your top fitness hashtags are for your business’s content. However, there are other tools that help you to pin down what exactly is working with your hashtags and what isn’t. We will touch on that later in the article!
First, make sure that you have related hashtags in your bio. This will help make your profile easier to discover and let users know what exactly you and your business are all about.
Instagram lets you use up to 30 hashtags on a single post and 10 on a story post. That means you have 40 different opportunities for you to expand your audience for each post you share. Take advantage of that!
Now, I say 40 for each post you share because an important tactic for reaching the maximum amount of people is sharing your latest post on your story. Sharing your latest post on your story can let some users know that you have new content to check out. Often, new content gets lost in the endless feeds it appears on. Not only does this let users know you have new content if they missed it in their feed, but it also gives you a chance to utilize those 10 additional hashtags.
You have two options when including captions on a post.
- Post the hashtags underneath your caption and separating the caption from the hashtags by using a series of periods.
- Include the hashtags in a comment after you publish it.
With the handy dandy hashtag follow feature Instagram introduced in 2018, users stay up to date with their favorite hashtags. This means, that you, as a business owner, have ample opportunity for growing your following and keeping your following consistently engaged through hashtags.
You can create branded hashtags for your followers to follow to stay updated with certain campaigns you may be running. An example of this is Orange Theory’s #TransformationChallenge2021.
As you can see in the example, Orange Theory uses all forms of different content to share about the challenge. You can use hashtags on Instagram reels, video posts, and static image posts. These days, many people share their TikTok content on Instagram reels too!
Hashtag campaigns on Instagram build a sense of community around the idea or concept that you create. These campaigns allow you to see how users are interacting with your brand and content and how participants are interacting with each other. This also gives you a specific channel to deliver content through to reach users.
Aside from using hashtags to share focused content and campaigns on Instagram, use hashtags to get featured on the Explore Page.
Top Fitness Hashtags on the Instagram Explore Page
The Explore Page is the throne of Instagram. When considering what your goals are for your hashtags on Instagram, you must aim for a feature on the Explore Page. Lots of speculation surrounds how algorithms choose posts to include on your explore page.
However, similar to the creepily accurate ads that you receive, the algorithm reads your behaviors as an Instagram user. It then shows you posts that people with similar behaviors and interests are engaging with. The more engagements a post gets, the more likely it is to land on the Explore Page for someone.
What is the number one method to get more engagement on your posts? If you guess hashtags, then you are correct! If you didn’t, then that’s a little awkward considering the article you’re reading.
Nonetheless, strategically used hashtags open the doors for your spot on the explore page. Hashtags show your posts to more people than just your followers. The more people that engage with your posts outside of your followers, the more likely your content will trigger the Explore Page algorithm that your post would be of interest to people in the sphere of what your content addresses. Therefore, it’s extremely important to use the top fitness hashtags on your content.
On Instagram, just one properly targeted hashtag can boost your engagement by 12%.
Therefore, consistently post to the top fitness hashtags to generate engagement from users outside of your following. The more often you draw in attention from people with similar interests and behaviors, the more likely your content will be featured to new potential users and clients.
Facebook is not the most ideal place to find success with hashtags, but let me tell you one thing right now – it never hurts to use hashtags. At worst, it CAN be a waste of time including them if you do not use relevant tags. Indexing your content with a topic label like a hashtag can do nothing but help users find your content and account.
Essentially, the use of Facebook hashtags does just that. Users specifically have to search hashtags to find content related to them. There is no way for users to follow tags. Therefore, you should make sure that you use one or two relevant hashtags to describe the topic of your content.
It has actually been found that too many hashtags can decrease engagement!
Facebook hashtags help people find more content around topics but do not necessarily help share that content. However, if you have a hashtag campaign that you are using on your other platforms, then you should use that tag in your Facebook posts as well.
Twitter is well kn0wn for the way that hashtags trend locally and around the world. Users can keep their eyes and ears on the pulse of what is going on in their city, state, region, or literally the biggest topics trending across the globe. This means that considering the top fitness hashtags on Twitter can be very valuable for your social media campaigns.
The fact that the Explore Page is noted with a ‘#’ icon just goes to show the importance of hashtags when employing Twitter for social media campaigns. Hashtags are even important to use in your profile biography!
Be sure to include the latest top fitness hashtags in your bio to make sure your profile is visible to people searching that topic. It’s an excellent way for you to get exposure to your business profile! It gives people a good idea of what kind of content to expect from you and what your niche is.
This is where you could narrow down the people interested in your content. If you are specifically a strength training coach, then you can include #StrengthTraining in your bio! Answer the questions for potential customers before they have to ask them.
Specific tools help to generate the trending hashtags around a topic, but we can get into those more later in the article.
Make Hashtags Your Message
Twitter recommends that you only use up to two hashtags per post, but you can use more than that. With the pesky character limit on Twitter, you want to make sure that you are using hashtags conservatively. By this, I mean you need to get a little bit creative how you implement them.
Try to use hashtags in the sentences you are writing. For example:
“Check out our latest article on #PersonalTrainingTips and #ClientMotivation.”
Or
“Get your #FitnessGoals on track this year with a #PersonalTrainer.”
This will leave you more room for additional text or just get your point across much easier.
LinkedIn users can follow hashtags and use them to view content focused around that topic similar to Facebook. LinkIn hashtags must be a bit more professional than hashtags you might use to hop on trends for any other platform.
LinkedIn is a great social media for fitness professionals to use to attract new clients and even find people to employ. Therefore, hashtags on this platform must be appropriate and target professional conversations around your business’s interests.
Hootsuite suggests only using a maximum of five hashtags per LinkedIn post.
TikTok
TikTok, or in our case, FitTok is becoming increasingly more important to reaching younger audiences. Top fitness hashtags prove to be beneficial here as well.
For those of you not familiar with TikTok, it is an app where creators share 60 second or shorter videos. That’s literally it. However, its become wildly popular because of its simplicity and its openness to just about every topic you can think of.
Users have a For You Page where TikTok’s algorithms specifically deliver content relevant to their interests and engagements. Personally, I’ve had some wildly strange experiences with TikTok showing me a video relevant to a conversation I was just having over text.
I cannot make any claims to understanding how it works so well or what data it pulls from to serve your content. What I do know, though, is that the algorithm, with large help from hashtags, serves very personalized content to users. This means that you can easily reach your target audience with fitness-related videos.
You would be surprised to find out how much information that you can pack into just 60 seconds.
It’s best to use between two and four hashtags per post related to what your content covers. Like Instagram, the ideal is to get listed on the For You page for thousands of users to see. However, unlike Instagram, you can use one or two irrelevant hashtags to get there.
When videos go viral on TikTok, they go VIRAL. It’s absolutely not uncommon to reach a million views overnight. Therefore, trends move quickly through this platform. Using hashtags related to the most viral trends will help you to get in front of many more eyes. This is not to say you should go without using the top fitness hashtags as well!
Use both, two viral hashtags and two fitness hashtags! Also, three other important hashtag options to include are #fyp, #foryoupage, or #foryou.
Hashtag generator and tracker tools
As mentioned before, let’s go over some tools that can help tremendously in keeping your hashtags fresh, trendy, and relevant. Using the top fitness hashtags can be beneficial but you have to find the most valuable ones first!
Hands down, the best all-round software for generating and tracking hashtags on all social media accounts is Sprout Social. This option is best for gyms or personal training influencers who have money and focus not their social accounts succeeding.
For the individual trainer, though, you have plenty of free options to choose from when it at least comes to generating the top fitness hashtags for your post.
Hashtag Tracking Tools
Hashtag Generator Tools
How often do I use the same hashtags?
The aforementioned tools should help you get a better idea of what hashtags to use and when. Each platform will have different trending tags, so do not rely on using the same tags across the board.
For Instagram, keep an arsenal of 60 tags that you can rotate in using for each post. This arsenal should be updated once a month to ensure that you stay up to date with the top fitness hashtags. Most user behavior data on sites like Instagram is cached and updated monthly.
Make sure the hashtags you are using are not banned! They might be simple and seemingly unproblematic, but you know how people with the power of the internet get. They take things too far and before you know it your favorite hashtag is banned.
As long as you are diversifying your content and posting the appropriate hashtags related to that content, then you should not have any trouble.
The best way to know when you should rotate your tags is by monitoring their success and finding the current top fitness hashtags using the tools above.
If you liked this article then please leave a comment below and reach out to us for any suggestions on what kind of content you guys want next!
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