How To Choose Hashtags Calculator
A hashtag is a label that joins a post to a feed. The labels everyone uses are the ones nobody sees, which is the whole problem in one sentence.
Read as Home and ceramics, so the tag pools below come from that world. Instagram allows 30 per post. A tag of two or more words is far less crowded than one word, because almost nobody else has written that exact combination — that is the whole reason the niche bucket exists.
Balanced — tag set
Niche10K to 100K posts · days of life, the right audience
#ceramicmugs #slowlivinghome #handmadehomeware #smallbatchceramics
Mid100K to 1M posts · hours to a day of life
#ceramic #mugs #homedecor #interiorstyling #homemadeliving #shelfie
Broadover 1M posts · decays within minutes
#sale #shopping
- Tags generated
- 12
- Mix
- 2 broad / 6 mid / 4 niche
- Average length
- 11.6 chars
- Longest tag
- 19 chars
- Unreadably long
- 0
Reach figures are the usual published bands, not live counts, and they move with the season. The ordering matters more than the exact numbers: put the niche tags first so the post lands in a small feed it can actually win.
The formula this calculator uses
a set of n tags split roughly 25% broad, 45% mid and 30% niche, longest and most specific first
- n
- How many tags the set should contain
- T
- The reach tier a tag falls into: broad, mid or niche
How to check the result by hand
- 1
Write the topic as the audience searches it
The words a buyer would type, not the words the product team uses internally. Topic detection works by matching those words against a keyword list, so a jargon topic falls through to the general pool.
- 2
Pick the platform
The platform decides the ceiling and the sensible count. Thirty tags on Instagram and five on LinkedIn describe the same post differently, and the count that suits one looks like spam on the other.
- 3
Set how many tags you want
The count is the whole budget. Everything else is a question of how that budget is divided, and the split is what separates a set that lasts from a set that flashes and disappears.
- 4
Choose the strategy
Reach first puts half the set in the broad tier for a launch burst, niche first does the opposite for a slow and steady audience, and balanced sits between the two as the usual recommendation.
- 5
Check the lengths and the duplicates
One tag past the platform limit is enough to have the whole set rejected, and a repeated tag wastes a slot. The average and longest figures are printed so both problems are visible without reading every line.
For worked examples, common mistakes and the limits of this formula, read the full How To Choose Hashtags page.