How to Find Trending Hashtags on All Important Social Media Platforms

Lots of marketers have received benefits from real-time marketing campaigns. Spotting the right moment to attract attention to your brand/website/products can bring you lots of traffic and sales. In this situation, a winning solution would be to use popular hashtags while delivering relevant content.

Hashtags have lots of advantages and can categorize posts and topics on social media. If used correctly, it can bring more likes and followers, more visibility, higher audience and, if you're lucky enough, some clients maybe. If you want all that and you're wondering how to find trending hashtags, we got you covered with a list for multiple social media platforms:

1. How to Find Trending Hashtags on Twitter

1.1 Seek Ideas on Twitter Trends
1.2 Use Tools
1.3 Search Hashtags Websites

2. How to Find Trending Hashtags on Instagram

2.1 Look on the Explore Page
2.2 Check the Hashtag Autocomplete Feature
2.3 Follow Favorite Hashtags to Find New Ones
2.4 Follow Popular Influencers in Your Niche
2.5 Use Mobile Apps for Generating Hashtags
2.6 Explore Websites with Hashtags Lists

3. How to Find Trending Hashtags on Facebook

Before knowing how to find top trending hashtags, learning the use of them will define our social media marketing strategy.

Nowadays hashtags are popular and everyone uses them not just on Twitter but on various social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr.

When and Where Was the First Hashtag Ever Used?

Hashtags appeared for the first time on Twitter, on August 23, 2007. Chris Messina was the one that invented hashtags as a way to categorize messages. Previously the "pound sign" was used in C programming language and in lots of other ways to help the web.

He posted the first hashtag on Twitter:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina ⤳ Milwaukee (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

Chris wanted to have more “contextualization, content filtering and exploratory serendipity”.

The suggestion he made wasn't adopted by Twitter, but they started becoming more popular when the San Diego forest fires took place in Southern California. On July 2, 2009, Twitter started to hyperlink all hashtags in tweets and in 2010 Twitter added "Trending Topics" where you could see popular hashtags.

Hashtags originated from Twitter, so it's only fair to start telling how to find trending hashtags on Twitter.

1. How to Find Trending Hashtags on Twitter

It's a good idea to pepper your content on Twitter with hashtags to incrementally increase impressions and maybe followers. Once you find the hashtags, use one or two to change the engagement to your posts. The ideal number would be to use only two because studies showed that Twitter posts with more than two hashtags can diminish your engagement by an average of 17 percent.

To find popular hashtags in your niche and soar your Twitter marketing strategy, you should follow the next ideas.

1.1 Seek Ideas on Twitter Trends

What better way to start than with the integrated search engine from Twitter for following trending topics. You have two options to see Twitter trends:

• Choose to see trends for you, personalized based on your location or people you follow.
• Change the location and find trending Twitter hashtags for specific places.

Below you can see an example for trends in US for a specific day. The popularity of hashtags are different from one day to another so each day you can find different hashtags based on the location you set.

You can find popular Twitter hashtags that apply on a specific day each of the month, such as #MondayMotivation, #WednesdayWisdom, #ThursdayThoughts, or on national days, or based on the user behavior (#icebucketchallenge) and the latest news that appear in a country (#EatTheBabies) ??.

Choose general posts that you can use every week to schedule social posts in advance and then follow daily trending hashtags to boost your engagement and get more followers on Twitter.

1.2 Use Tools

Another option to capture high social media reach is to use tools that will search for popular hashtags based on a specific location. You get more accuracy and better localization.  Trendsmap is an example of such a hashtag tool.

The navigational tool works very simply and offers you geo-targeting topics based on your search. Scroll down, up, left or right, zoom in or zoom out to see what's trending on Twitter or find better niched hahstags. People talk about different events from one city to another, not to mention from one country/state to another. You can easily spot the differences and the topics by looking closely at the location you are in or you are targeting.

The map of hashtags helps you get a pulse on that segment and understand the events that are happening.  Adapt your message and use Twitter trending hashtags in your posts to get engagement from that audience.

Whether your brand is national, international or local, this tool will offer you awareness and context.

Another example is Hashtag Tracker that shows you how many people are mentioning a popular hashtag on a period of time or language. Run a quick hashtag research and voila. Once you find relevant hashtags, run them through the social listening tool to see the metrics and the mentions within the posts.

Get information on popular posts on Twitter with a hashtag, which you can retweet, mention and get more traction and more visibility. You can build up the topic by using the snowball effect, which is an amplification process that starts from something with a small significance and builds upon itself, becoming larger.

1.3 Search Hashtags Websites

Another way to find popular hashtags for Twitter is to look on websites that have collections and generate a list. Trends24 is a website that shows you hashtags every hour for lots of countries and cities.

Another example is #tagdef, where you can find popular hashtags by time frame, including current, weekly and all-time top hashtags, members. It is available for 8 languages including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian and Dutch.

The website also gives definitions of trending hashtags and topics, helping marketers find out more that there is on the topic before starting to share information on social media. This way you learn what's about to use it correctly and attract people's interest.

2. How to Find Trending Hashtags on Instagram

Instagram posts with hashtags are valued more. Always use relevant hashtags, don't add lots of them without any connection just to collect likes and comments because that is artificial engagement. Those people won't follow your content on Instagram and you might not get the same appreciation for your next posts.

BrandMentions allows you to apply these hashtag monitoring tactics you want for Instagram as well.

You can search for it in Quick Research or create campaigns for a specific brand or Instagram influencer to perform a more in-depth analysis. Check out the screenshot below for a search on the Starbucks hashtag.

The tool makes it easy to filter Instagram mentions from a list including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and Pinterest.

Put your game on strategy for Instagram and follow the next ideas to procure more trending hashtags:

2.1 Look on the Explore Page

Getting hashtags suggestion can start by looking on the Explore tab. The Explore tab is a collection of posts generated by your previous likes, followers. You can see here Instagram content liked and followed by your fans, where users with similar interests can find you and vice-versa. The feature is available on both mobile and desktop devices.

The first thing you should do is scoop through the posts that are relevant to you and similar to what you're trying to share. Then, look at hashtags and select only the hottest ones.

2.2 Check the Hashtag Autocomplete Feature

Instagram search feature offers lots of possibilities to find out what you're looking for. There are all sorts of trips and tricks to get trending hashtags and trending posts & people. By searching for a hashtag, Instagram will autocomplete lots of ideas you could use.

2.3 Follow Favorite Hashtags to Find New Ones

If you found an Instagram hashtag that is relevant to you, follow it and see top posts once people share them. Searching for certain hashtags will develop new ideas and show you similar hashtags.

All of your posts that use hashtags will be pushed into the hashtag pages, where you can follow those hashtags, look at top posts and most recent ones.

For example, the #lagodibraies hashtag is related to hashtags such as #dolomitesunesco, #braieslake and more. Check out the printscreen below:

Check top posts to get new ideas and engage with those posts to bring fans to your page. Make sure you make a correct selection of hashtags when adding them to your posts. The hashtags should reflect what your post is about. Don't create a crowded post with lots of hashtags.

2.4 Follow Popular Influencers in Your Niche

To find popular influencers in your niche, combine the techniques described above. Search for places and competitors to see who are their collaborators and what trending Instagram hashtags they use.

Influencers that succeed on Instagram don't use lots of hashtags and cut the irrelevant content. They keep it simple and apply niche keywords that put images right in front of their target audience.

2.5 Use Mobile Apps for Generating Hashtags

Another strategy to find trending hashtags is to use Instagram hashtag apps on your phone. The mobile usage is continuously increasing so using a mobile app to find out hashtags can be positive for user experience. In 2018, 58% of users said they prefer using Instagram on mobile rather than on desktop.

For iOs, Hashtag Expert for IG works great and gives you trending topics on various categories. Below you can see an example for Music.

The mobile app makes it easy to search for hashtags in a large database of Instagram hashtags, copy the ones that are relevant to you and paste them in your social posts.

For Android, Leetags is a hashtag generator that gives you recommendations based on the keywords you're searching for. It indicates the hashtag popularity in percentage.

You can filter the results based on popularity and relevancy. Plus you can customize your searches to select the number or add dots above the hashtags. To avoid repeating the same tags, you can have them shuffled when copying.

2.6 Explore Websites with Hashtags Lists

Similar to Twitter, there are websites with trending Instagram hashtag lists. All-hashtag.com is one of the most popular and reliable website for generating hashtags. It is free to use so anyone can test it out and find ideas.

The hashtag generator allows you to select top, random or live hashtags. If you want to see trending hashtags, then select Top and you'll get a list from today, the last 7 days, last month and all time.

3. How to Find Trending Hashtags on Facebook

Unlike Twitter and Instagram, most of Facebook's posts are private, so finding trending hashtags on Facebook might not be as effective. The hashtag system works better for company pages that use hashtags mainly for their marketing campaigns.

Your Facebook hashtags should always be representative for your posts. Look for niched hashtags and select only those that tick the user, not just click.

One option would be to actually search for the hashtag on Facebook; depending on what you're searching for, you can be lucky and find some good ideas and lots of Facebook posts, or the results can be poor.

Another option would be to use tools such as BrandMentions to create projects and track Facebook hashtags for a period of time and find popular pages and popular Facebook posts.

Using hashtags can boost your social media posts and bring lots of other benefits. It is important to use keywords in hashtags correctly. So make sure that when combining two or more keywords it doesn't turn out to be something else. That applies when developing a new marketing campaign. Choose wisely and ask a few members of your online community before coming out officially with the hashtag name.

Using hashtags wrong can do more harm than good. Hashtags should be relevant and used only when it's necessary.

Until next time, #goodluck to #becreative!