Why You Should Use Hashtags on Instagram as an Interior Designer

Hashtags are dead, right? Wrong 🙃

If you scroll on Instagram for more than a few minutes, 9 times out of 10, you’ll see at least one clickbait-y reel claiming that some feature of Instagram is dead – or worse, hurt your account if you use it. And the latest victim? Hashtags.

As a social media manager who works with (and on) the Instagram accounts of many interior designers, I can confidently say hashtags are NOT dead and, honestly, they’re FAR from it.

Hashtags Aren’t Dead, But Here’s Why SO Many Experts Are Claiming Them to Be

Experts started to claim “hashtags are dead” when Instagram started prioritizing other factors in addition to hashtags. Essentially, hashtags stopped carrying the same weight they used to in your post’s discoverability.

But saying “hashtags are dead” is a bit of an overstatement (especially for interior designers). 

Hashtags are one of the og features of Instagram, and the platform encouraged over-hashtagging from the start, allowing users to add up to 30 tags in a post. So it’s not really that surprising when over-hashtagging stopped working, experts took it as a sign not to use the feature anymore.

Here’s the thing, though: Hashtags might not carry the same weight, but when used strategically, they can drastically improve the discoverability of your posts and, yes, bring in more leads from Instagram.

For example, a member of SMM on Speed Dial (my social media membership for interior designers) gets consistent inquiries thanks to hashtags:

Which is why I’ll 100% fight anyone who says NOT to use hashtags.

Why You Should Use Hashtags in Your Instagram Posts as an Interior Designer

While hashtags are not contributing as much as they used to for reach, they have an arguably even more important role now:

Making you discoverable.

You’re using them to categorize your posts and tell Instagram who might be interested in your content, so they can show it to those people and achieve THEIR goal of keeping people on the app while you achieve yours – getting your content shown to people who would be interested in your design services.

And, with the newest update (the one where your Instagram posts can now get indexed on Google), you need your posts to be discoverable.

TL;DR – Hashtags can introduce you to an entirely new audience, one that is already looking for content like yours.

How to Use Hashtags in Your Posts and Actually Get Results

Before you get carried away, you don’t need to spend 30+ minutes per post researching the right hashtags. You just need to pick some (anywhere from 1 – 30) to use on each post that is relevant to the post and your account.

I tend to group the hashtags into seven categories and recommend picking a few from each:

1. General Interior Design – ex. #interiordesignersofinstagram, #interiordesignerideas
2. Design Styles – ex. #traditionalinteriordesign, #coastalinteriordesign, #minimalistinterior
3. Room-Specific Hashtags – ex. #kitchensofinsta, #primarybedroomdesign, #luxurybathroomdesign
4. Material Focused – ex. #wallpaperinspo, #tileinspo, #sherwinwilliams, #polishednickelfaucet
5. By Location – ex. #californiainteriordesigner, #coloradointeriordesigner
6. Related Industries – ex. #californiarealtor, #californiahomes
7. Publications + Brands – ex. #archdigest, #mymodernluxury

Choosing a niche or more specific hashtags helps you avoid “oversaturated” hashtags where your post will get drowned in all the content already there.

Want to make picking the hashtags for your posts easy? Get access to my $7 Hashtag Vault for Interior Designers, packed with 100+ hashtags for you to copy + paste here. No more stressing, just making it easy for Instagram to put your content in front of the right people.