Whether you're a creator, brand, or just trying to grow your reach on social, hashtags can help. But you need to use them the right way. This cheat sheet breaks it down platform-by-platform. And I am keeping it short and sweet, so it's easily digestible.

What Hashtags Are Actually For

Hashtags help platforms like Instagram and TikTok categorise and recommend your content, so using hashtags that are relevant to your content and channel are highly recommended.

They are also useful for making your videos/posts searchable, imagine someone is searching 'how to grow on TikTok' and you've used #GrowOnTikTok, your content will be part of the content that is shown!

They can act as navigation tools (especially branded/series hashtags), so if you always place a branded hashtag (Ours being #MoonSoldierUniveristy) your community can easily locate more of your content or my favourite and one I do not often hear about is series hashtag, so if you're creating a 7 part series on TikTok you can create a specific hashtag for that series so the next video is easily found.

The 3 Types of Hashtags You Should Use

1. Broad – Big-picture topics to help reach a wide audience
   e.g., #CreativeTips, #SmallBusinessAdvice, #Marketing

2. Niche – Targeted, community-based tags
   e.g., #HashtagStrategy, #FitnessDesigners

3. Branded/Series – Tags you create to build brand recall or sort your content
   e.g., #MoonSoldierUniversity, #MSUTips

TikTok Hashtag Strategy (2025)

• Use: 3–5 hashtags

• Only use in the caption (hashtags in comments do not help). Or on your video, this also is a good place to place them to grow your reach

• Mix of: 1 broad + 1 niche + 1 branded/series

• Use TikTok’s Creator Search Insights Tool to find real-time tag suggestions

• Check your video’s search bar label to see how TikTok categorised it

• Don’t waste space on irrelevant/trending tags that don’t match your content

Instagram Hashtag Strategy (2025)

• Use 3-5 hashtags or keep to around 5 across all platforms if thats easier for you to keep track of

• Can place them in the caption or first comment

• For smaller accounts under 100,000, caption placement works better

• and for bigger account above 100,000, that want that more aesthetically pleasing caption without hashtags, you can place them in your first comment, but as soon as you post so the algorithm will read them because once it has categorised your content it will not come back

• Vary hashtags from post to post to avoid repetition/spam behaviour and to keep your hashtags relevant to that particular post
  
• Don’t stress about others commenting with spam tags, they don’t affect your reach

YouTube Hashtag Strategy (2025)

• Use: above 3 hashtags (place them in the description, or your title)

• YouTube shows top 3 hashtags above your description

• So I would recommend using branded hashtags to categorise your content for people to find easily

• Or to find series, similar to playlists

• Tags in the tag section will still help with SEO, better than hashtags but hashtags still help

LinkedIn Hashtag Strategy (2025)

• Use: 3–5 hashtags max, this to to strike a nice balance between professionalism and discoverability

• Place at the end of the post for clean formatting

• Mix broad (e.g., #Marketing, #Branding) with niche hashtags, broad helps with reach a bigger audience and niche is for targeting those interested in the topic you're content is about

• Add 1 branded tag if building personal or project-based content

• Don’t over-tag on LinkedIn, as this could get flagged excessive tagging as spammy

Tools to Use

• TikTok Creator Search Insights Tool - very good to locate content gaps in topic and TikTok is showing you what content to make

• Instagram's Search bar also shows you some ideas but its not as in depth as TikTok

• You could also manually search the topics you want to talk about and find similar content to the content you're making and look at the hashtags other content is using
  

• Then the is hashtag tools like Hashtagify.me and KeywordTool.io

Common Mistakes

• Putting hashtags in the wrong place (especially TikTok/YouTube)

• Using only trending or broad tags, find a good balance between trending, niche, broad and branded

• Not having a branded hashtag - this will help your community find more of your videos easily without needing to go onto your profile

• Using too many hashtags (especially 20+ on IG or going above 60 on Youtube (this is an insane amount but Youtube will complete ignore all hashtags above this number))

• Copy-pasting the same ones every post

Final Tips

Keep a hashtag bank organised by platform and theme. Rotate weekly and track performance.

And if you found this blog helpful, feel free to follow our social accounts on topics like this on TikTok @MoonSoldierUniversity