The Best Hashtags for TikTok

A best time to post chart for hashtags behind a woman holding a magnifying glass and TikTok posts to the side.

Formulating a TikTok hashtag strategy is a no-brainer if you are serious about trying to increase your reach on this network. However, what is the best way to do it? And how can you find out what hashtags to use on TikTok? Some may think that finding the most viewed hashtags on TikTok is all that is needed. Unfortunately, this is often the wrong strategy since simply finding the most popular hashtag on TikTok won’t help if your content is not relevant to the hashtag or your target audience is not interested in the topic that a specific hashtag represents.

In reality, there is a need to research TikTok hashtag trends within your industry or niche in order to truly benefit from their use. But how do you find what hashtags you should use while relying on an approach that is data-driven? In this article, we will show you how to use a TikTok hashtag research tool to discover what hashtags you should use in your posts as well as how to utilize TikTok hashtag analytics to its fullest extent.

Why Using Relevant TikTok Hashtags is Important

Many people may ask themselves what are the best hashtags for TikTok. When looking for what hashtag to use on TikTok, you should always put a premium on relevance. Hashtags on TikTok are used to help people to more easily find specific topics or trends that interest them. Using hashtags in your posts can help increase your reach and, if you are producing high-quality content that meets the search intent of users, can also help you increase views and followers. Hashtag research also represents an important step in the TikTok SEO optimization process, which can help your profile and content be more discoverable.

For this reason, it is important to set up a TikTok hashtag strategy that helps you map the various hashtags you should be using. But how do you actually do this? It may be tempting to simply research general TikTok hashtag trends and decide which hashtags to use once you know what ones are trending. However, in order to truly understand how to find the right hashtags for TikTok, you need to be looking for which hashtags are most relevant for your industry, topic-focus, or niche as well as which ones are correlated with higher post interaction rates.

The process of researching these hashtags requires a social media tool that allows for TikTok hashtag research and a few steps to create your data set. The key to finding the best TikTok hashtags for your posts is to research what hashtags are being used in your industry and are generating the most post-interactions. Below, we take you through the TikTok hashtag research steps to find these hashtags.

A social media post and graphs surrounding a woman with a magnifying glass and a man with binoculars.

How to Find the Best Hashtags for your TikTok Posts

Utilizing data-driven approaches is the best way to find hashtags for TikTok that will help your profile grow. In reality, the best hashtag(s) for a TikTok post would be the ones that correlate with high post interaction rates. In order to discover these hashtags, it is crucial to find an advanced TikTok hashtag analytics tool that allows you to analyze your own profile and numerous similar profiles in your industry or niche to uncover what hashtags you should use on your posts.

In order to show you how to use a TikTok hashtag research tool to discover you find the best hashtags for your TikTok posts, we will present a real-life example. In doing so, we will provide a detailed step-by-step overview relating to how to find the right hashtags for TikTok by highlighting what to do to if you are working in the home decor market and wanted to study the TikTok hashtags used by competitors in this industry.

In going through this scenario, we will be analyzing hashtags used by home decor companies with the assumption that we want to find what types of hashtags, on average, generate higher post interaction rates. The companies that we included for our analysis include as mix of US and European home decor companies: Crate and Barrel, Depot, Etsy, IKEA, Pottery Barn, Target, The Citizenry, Uncommon Goods, Urban Outfitters, Wayfair, West Elm, and World Market.

In conducting this analysis, it is important to have the right TikTok hashtag research tool at your disposal. In our example, we will be using the all-in-one social media tool, Fanpage Karma, that possesses advanced TikTok hashtag research capabilities. All the various charts and graphs below are generated by the Fanpage Karma tool.

A banner with two people high-fiving and a "Start your free trial" button and dark background.

Step 1: Select the Profiles for your TikTok Hashtag Analysis

The first step in learning how to find the best hashtags for TikTok posts involves identifying what companies you want to include in your data analysis. Remember, we are researching TikTok hashtag trends related to our industry. We should not focus on what hashtags are most popular in general, but ones that are relevant for your industry and niche, as well as for the type of content you are posting.

In order to correctly undertake hashtag research for TikTok, you need to track and analyze as many profiles as you can, provided they post content similar to yours and are focused on more or less the same topics or industry. It is helpful to include as many as you can so your data set is more meaningful. For this reason, it is recommended to have a social media tool that allows for unlimited profile tracking.

It is important to remember that relevance is key, and adding profiles to your data set just because they have many followers or attract a lot of attention can negatively affect your analysis. Along these lines, it is important to make sure that you are operating in similar geographical locations with the profiles you are adding to your analysis. If you are a local company that is only concerned with a geographically limited area, it probably is not helpful to be adding numerous large, international companies to your data set. This is because these companies may be using hashtags that are not as relevant to your target audience. However, if you believe that these companies would be targeting the same audience as your, then they may be relevant for your analysis.

A woman holding a megaphone inside a social media post with a hashtag in the background.

Step 2: Determine your Timeframe for your Data Set

Different months or seasons of the year may see different types of hashtags being used. After all, there are different trends that may take place related to home decor in the middle of Summer or right as Winter is approaching. On the other hand, you may want to take a more general approach when looking for what hashtags to use on TikTok and analyze the best performing hashtags for a given 6, 8, or 12-month period.

It is important to keep in mind that the timeframe affects the size of your data set, with longer timeframes of analysis providing more data points, while the shorter timeframes means fewer data points. However, analyzing a shorter, specific timeframe gives you a more precise look at certain months or seasons which can be beneficial depending on your goals.

Let’s provide an example of how different timeframes of analysis can affect your data output. First, we will simply look at the Top 15 hashtags in relation to post interaction rate in July 2023 for the companies we mentioned above.

(July 2023)

The bar chart shows what hashtags correspond with hashtags with the highest post interactive rates just for just a single month (July, 2023). Simply from studying the data output, we can determine which hashtags are relevant for your company and the content you post. From this, you can choose what TikTok hashtags you may want to include in your posts based on whether they are correlated with higher post interaction rates. However, what would happen if we added two months to are analysis and looked at the data from May to July 2023?

A bar chart showing the hashtags with the highest post interaction rates for specified profiles in July-May 2023.

(May to July 2023)

As you can see from the results, there are differences both in terms of the hashtags in the chart as well as the post interaction rates that are correlated to these hashtags. While this is only a simple example, it helps illustrate how the timeframe of analysis can affect what TikTok hashtags you should consider using.

Step 3: Study the TikTok Hashtag Analytics Output

When using the right TikTok hashtag research tool, you can explore different ways to look at data in order to determine what are the best hashtags for your TikTok profile. Being able to study TikTok hashtag analytics can give you helpful insights about the hashtags you should consider using for your posts.

To begin, we will look at three different ways you can look at the data output with a TikTok hashtag research tool. First is a simple bar chart that orders the Top 10 hashtags in our data set by post interaction rate. This bar chart clearly shows what hashtags are correlated with the highest post interaction rate in your data set and can be useful if you simply want to know what the top hashtags are.

(First Half 2023, All Profiles)

However, perhaps you are interested in seeing the metrics for all hashtags in the data set as well as other important metrics such as the posts per day that used a specific hashtag or the average number of interactions per impression. Below is an example of viewing your data in a metric table.

A metric table that shows data for all hashtags in the data set for the first half of 2023.

(First Half 2023, All Profiles)

This metric table view is valuable for getting a more in-depth view on the performance of many different hashtags. There will, of course, be many hashtags in this table, but you can also filter to show the top hashtags for a number of different metrics that you may be interested in.

However, perhaps you are searching for hashtags that are correlated with high post interaction rates but are not used that often. The word chart view below can be valuable for that type of analysis. The large words indicate that a hashtag was used more often while smaller words mean it was used less often. The greener the word indicates a higher post interaction rate while redder words means those hashtags have lower post interaction rates.

A word chart showing hashtags and their relative post interaction rate as well as how often they were used compared to other hashtags for the first half of 2023.

(First Half 2023, All Profiles)

As you see above, this word chart view can be helpful to find high performing hashtags that may not be used frequently. This can give you an advantage over your competition that is not using a TikTok hashtag research tool.

In concluding this section, we want to stress how important it is to carefully select the profiles you include in your data set. The addition or removal of profiles from your analysis can change your data output. For instance, perhaps we want to remove some of the large companies from our data set, namely Target, IKEA, and Wayfair. What would happen to our results?

(First Half 2023, without Target, IKEA, and Wayfair profiles)

We see that there are some similarities between the data output, but also some differences. The point of this brief comparison is to show that changes to the profiles you include in your analysis may alter your results and the types of hashtag recommendations you may receive. Similar to our example in Step 2 relating to the timeframe you choose to analyze, you should keep in mind that analyzing relevant and similar profiles in your industry or niche is key for effective TikTok hashtag research.

Step 4: Continue to Monitor and Assess Hashtag Performance

Using the right hashtags is not, by itself, going to dramatically increase your post interaction rate or better any other type of metric. Your content plays the essential role in this case. Creating engaging and interesting content is a must to help you expand your reach and gain new followers. Benchmarking and analysis of other profiles can help you see where you need to improve or learn from others. You should also monitor how your profile compares to other similar ones.

However, using the right hashtags can be one of the factors that gives your posts an advantage over the competition. When thinking about how to find trending hashtags on TikTok, you should keep in mind that popular and relevant hashtags in an industry or niche can change and new TikTok hashtag trends can emerge. Using a TikTok hashtag research tool can help you stay on top of these trends.

Conclusion

As we have seen, learning how to find the best TikTok hashtags is not impossible. This article has shown that it is best to use a TikTok hashtag research tool and follow an analytical approach. This is because it is important to research what TikTok hashtags correlate with key metrics, such as post interaction rate or impressions per post.

If you are looking for a social media tool that comes with TikTok hashtag research capabilities as well as other “all-in-one” features such as analytics, publishing, research, and community management features, Fanpage Karma offers a free 14-day trial of its tool. Additionally, Fanpage Karma runs free weekly webinars that highlight how to use this social media tool can help you with your social media activities.