Food photography and social media are a match made in heaven, and if you’re an avid food photographer you need to be on Instagram. However, unlocking the potential of Instagram isn’t as easy as pasting your latest food pics with a list of the most popular Instagram hashtags for foodies.
In fact, without knowing how to use food photography hashtags properly into your Instagra, you may end up going unnoticed and feeling discouraged.
With a few tweaks to your Instagram strategy, and some working knowledge of how to use hashtags, you can turn this around and start building an engaged audience for your work.
What are Instagram food photography hashtags and what do they do?
As a food photographer you want to avoid your professional food shots getting mixed up with the millions of amateur snaps Instagram users take of their food every day.
That’s where hashtags come into the picture.
Hashtags are keywords that allow you to define what your images are about and supply a quick visual cue to viewers that helps them contextualize what they are looking at.
More importantly, Hashtags added to images make those images visible on hashtag searches, while also allowing Instagram users to browse related images via tagged content.
When a user runs a hashtag search they will be presented with two views of the search results:
- Top posts will display the tagged images that have the highest levels of engagement and post likes.
- Recent posts will display the images that were posted most recently, using the hashtag in question.
How to use food photography Instagram hashtags
Since your goal on Instagram is to get your food photography seen by as many people as possible, it can be tempting to think that you should target all your images at the largest possible audience.
Unfortunately, this seemingly logical approach doesn’t work unless you already have a very popular Instagram account with lots of engagement with your content.
That’s because the average Instagram post will not have enough engagement to appear among the top posts for a popular hashtag with millions of posts.
Furthermore, the average post with a popular hashtag will only be visible to users who choose to view recent posts in the split second before this content is submerged by newer posts.
The correct way to use Instagram hashtags is to narrow down your audience to improve visibility and engagement.
- When using a hashtag, focus on what makes your image unique.
- Target hashtags with smaller post numbers – anything over a million posts is probably going to be a waste of time.
Taking this approach achieves two things.
Firstly, it reduces competition, which means your image has a better chance of showing up in the top posts for that hashtag and will also display for longer in the recent posts section.
Secondly, your images will be seen by people who are specifically looking for what you have to offer. This relevance can make a huge difference to engagement with your content.
How many post likes do I need to appear in the top posts?
Appearing in the top posts requires engagement with your content. The more posts there are for the hashtag you are targeting, the more engagement you will need to appear there.
This is a numbers game, and as a rule of thumb you can divide the number of posts for a given hashtag by 1,000 to find out how many posts likes you will need to appear among the top posts.
Any post with a hashtag featuring over a million posts will typically require thousands of likes to appear in the top posts.
Meanwhile, a hashtag with 20,000 posts will fall comfortably within the range of likes the average professional food photographer can get on their posts.
How many Instagram hashtags should I use?
Instagram allows you to use up to 30 hashtags on a photo post.
If you’re keeping things specific with your hashtag you probably won’t ever need to use the full number of hashtags available.
Also bear in mind that loading an image with hashtags can make it harder for viewers to quickly understand what the image is about and can look both desperate and amateurish.
Targeting influencers
Not all your hashtags need to describe or categorize your images.
You can also use hashtags to catch the attention of influencer accounts that focus on food photography.
Get the right person’s attention and your image could be picked up and shared by an account with millions of followers.
Also remember to always use a hashtag describing your own business to make it easier for Instagram viewers to share, view and search content relevant to your hashtag.
The most popular food photography hashtags for Instagram
Still looking for a list of popular food photography hashtags to use on Instagram?
By now you should be aware that succeeding on Instagram is a matter of quality not quantity, particularly when you are building a name for yourself.
The following list of food photography hashtags can therefore be used to indicate which popular hashtags to avoid, while giving you some ideas for creating more customized hashtags related to your own content.
| Hashtag | Post number |
| #foodphotography | 7,919,166 |
| #foodphotographer | 2,827,380 |
| #foodphoto | 9,272,400 |
| #foodphotos | 1,253,863 |
| #foodphotooftheday | 551,309 |
| #foodphotograph | 589,307 |
| #foodphotographyandstyling | 568,149 |
| #foodphotoshoot | 265,599 |
| #foodphotononstop | 147,148 |
Get discovered on Cherrydeck
Instagram is a great way to build your brand and a following for your work. However, the channel was not designed to connect professional photographers with potential clients.
That’s where Cherrydeck can help you. Our popular platform was designed to give professional photographers the opportunity to showcase their work to people searching for their services.
Signing up is quick and easy, and as a member of our busy community you will enjoy access to:
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- The ability to present your events to our large creative community.
Visit Cherrydeck now to sign up. ?
