Have you ever heard of the banned Instagram hashtags? You may witness a 12.6% increase in engagement rate or get penalized by using hashtags on Instagram.
With the growth of Instagram, hashtags have become an effective tool in every business strategy. Meanwhile, spammers, bots, and trolls seem to have increased to a significant number.
For this reason, Instagram is implementing some methods to catch false activities. Although this has served the purpose well, many Instagram users have faced up to some issues into the bargain.
One of the issues is using the banned Instagram hashtags, which are unlikely to be limited to a list as they repeatedly change. However, you can check them before using them. In this article, we will tell you what the banned Instagram hashtags are, and how you can avoid them.
Why are some hashtags on Instagram not searchable?
Do you ever wonder why you can’t search for certain hashtags on Instagram? That’s because they are associated with the banned Instagram hashtags, but what are they?
Some posts are reported due to violating Instagram community guidelines and terms of use. As a result, hashtags used in those posts get banned. Then any posts using the banned Instagram hashtags will be evidently hidden.
The first reason for not having a fixed list of banned hashtags is that the investigations’ result varies based on community reports.
Secondly, some hashtags may have been banned indefinitely, whereas some are banned just temporarily.
Consequently, if you have a post that didn’t perform as well as you had expected, you might have found out why. You need to see whether or not you used banned hashtags.
What happens if you use a banned Instagram hashtag?
As mentioned earlier, using a banned hashtag will result in not showing your posts to Instagram users. You may suspect the low performance of a particular post; that’s because your audience saw the post only by visiting your page or the link you shared on your stories.
Moreover, using too many banned Instagram hashtags leads to having your Instagram profile flagged, by which Instagram can shadow-ban or remove your account.
How to avoid banned Instagram hashtags?
Well, the first thing that springs to mind is checking with a list of banned Instagram hashtags; however, many of the hashtags on the list may have been unbanned. Furthermore, some other hashtags may have been banned while the list you are checking is not updated.
Since Instagram doesn’t publish a constantly-updated list, there are two ways to avoid banned hashtags.
1. Search each hashtag you wish to use for a post.
What does it mean when you search a hashtag on Instagram, and it says, “No results found”? That means you should not go for that particular hashtag.
This search also helps you with your hashtag strategy to find the most popular hashtags relevant to your niche alongside reducing the risk of using a banned Instagram hashtag to zero.
2. Use top Instagram hashtag generator tools.
You might want to use up to 30 hashtags for each post, even less than that number may not seem an easy feat to be done every time. So the best way to avoid banned Instagram hashtags and work out the right hashtag strategy to improve your engagement rate is to get help from an AI hashtag generator tool. We recommend using AiSchedul for its reliability and advanced features.
Why AiSchedul?
It is not uncommon for brands to use AI generator tools to find the right hashtags for their niche and AiSchedul is one of the best tools to not only build up the right hashtag strategy but also grow your followers with many other features such as planning your content.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how the AiSchedul hashtag generator works.
Step #1 – Sign up for free.
Step #2 – Go to the dashboard and click “schedule posts”.
Step #3 – Search related keywords to your post or business, and AiSchedul will give you the most popular hashtags in order.
Step #4 – schedule your content and post them right away or plan to post them automatically days, weeks, or months later.
Conclusion
It is vital for every brand to find the right hashtags, but more importantly, you should be aware that you cannot use banned Instagram hashtags as your posts will be hidden and cause low performance.