8 Best Strategies To Use TikTok Hashtags In 2025

Posted by John Brandon, Senior Contributor | 7 hours ago | /innovation, /social-media, editors-pick, Editors' Pick, Innovation, Social Media, socialmedia, standard, True Evergreen SEO Contributor, true-evergreen-seo-contributor | Views: 12

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One of the easiest and most straightforward methods of growing an audience on TikTok is to use hashtags. While it’s possible to gain traction for your videos without using TikTok hashtags, they do promote growth. That’s because the best hashtags for TikTok tend to fuel the algorithm, helping categorize your content and making it more discoverable. Taking advantage of viral TikTok hashtags means you are jumping on the bandwagon. The most popular TikTok hashtags attract more followers, increase engagement and increase views.

You might not be a true believer in hashtags on TikTok. How can a simple hashtag like #gaming or #style help grow your following? The truth is, few viral posts blow up on TikTok unless they use hashtags. It’s a quick way to identify the content and prioritize it as worth exploring. They still increase reach!

One reason has to do with user expectations. Not only does TikTok use hashtags as a way to prioritize content, but users also expect them. The algorithm has even evolved to push out content that has trending hashtags over content that is more generic and not labelled specifically. Combined with other strategies related to viral growth (such as using a trending song), TikTok hashtags help promote content to a wide audience. Think of hashtags as the key to unlocking searchability, discoverability and virality.

TikTok Hashtag Strategies

The first thing to know about using hashtags is to make sure you are strategic and intentional with them. Yes, the #gaming hashtag might work, but it’s critical to find an audience and a community by choosing more specific hashtags. It’s important to go broad and specific at the same time.

Many of the tips below are focused on doing just that: building a strong community around a brand, topic or concept. Influencers, business owners, gamers and entrepreneurs (or just about anyone trying to attract more followers and views) can all benefit from a TikTok hashtag strategy. Pick a hashtag that will help build the community you want, whether that is #realestate or #spacetravel. Hashtags are a way to mark all content as searchable, whether it’s a video you schedule on TikTok or going live on TikTok. Just add a series of hashtags to every post that helps identify the content to your audience and your demographic.

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It can be hard to predict which hashtags will make your content more discoverable, and the truth is no one outside of ByteDance (the TikTok parent company) really fully understands how the algorithm actually works. It’s obvious that hashtags help, because viral posts that use them are easier to find and can blow up on TikTok faster. Just know that hashtags will help you reach your goals when users do a search and when the algorithm analyzes your content and makes it available in the feed. Another important factor when using hashtags is to know which ones are trending. Fortunately, TikTok itself makes that obvious as you check for viral content.

1. Build Your Community

Start by building your community. Once again, go broad and specific at the same time. Pick the main category you are targeting, such as #business or #startups but then dive down into more specific hashtags, creating one for your own content that appears on every post. You will want to focus on trending hashtags as well.

Why focus on community? The short answer is that the most successful influencers and TikTok users know that the secret to success is to engage with people on a specific topic. Become an expert on Wi-Fi routers, or repairing a vintage VW Beatle, or how to clean out your gutters. Whatever it is, a hashtag will draw in an audience interested in that topic. Using #wifirouter or #vwbeatle helps build a community, and users will often come back for more when they see you are posting often with those hashtags. It’s not a one-off process, though. Make sure you are consistently using hashtags for a specific community interested in that topic.

2. Find Your Niche

As mentioned, it’s okay to use trending hashtags and go broad (say with #gaming), but know that you will likely find more success when you carve out your niche. This often means inventing your own hashtag and then using it often enough that your audience starts using it as well and it expands beyond your own feed.

In most cases, when you find a niche, the most important step is to make sure it aligns with what you want to accomplish. For example, if you are posting TikTok videos about the next Microsoft Xbox console, it’s best to focus on what makes your content different and worth following. You might specialize in the hardware design or upcoming games, so a hashtag like #nextxboxgames might perform better than just using #xbox. Think of a hashtag that is not just trending but also focused enough to avoid competition. Avoid getting too hyper-focused with hashtags since you likely won’t find a large audience, even if you increase engagement.

3. Avoid Using Too Many Hashtags

Adding hashtags can help your content go viral, and being intentional about which ones you use can increase engagement. It’s also true that you can go too far adding hashtags, especially if they are not that relevant or don’t fit your topic of discussion. Too many hashtags can hurt your engagement as well.

The reason is that the TikTok algorithm might flag your content as not being easy to categorize. Adding too many hashtags can negate any benefit to using them when TikTok decides your post is too spammy. That can happen specifically when you add too many variations of the same hashtag, such as #tech #techie and #technology. Think of TikTok hashtags as labels and tags that differentiate your post from other content. When you do that, it becomes easier to add those labels as a method of categorization. The basic guideline here is to add only about five hashtags or less. Any more than that can flag your content as spam.

4. Find Other Influencers

Here’s a tip that could really make a huge difference in building a following and increasing engagement on TikTok. Before you start using a hashtag, do some research on what other influencers in your same category are using for hashtags and which ones generated the most views and the most interest.

In other words, you don’t have to invent the wheel. You can check to see if there’s a wheel that other users invented. Perhaps it’s a hashtag that’s broad enough to have already attracted a wide audience and you are adding your own thoughts and observations. You can reverse engineer this approach as well. In the Discover tab, look for trending hashtags, then look up the influencers who are using them. Dig deeper with that influencer to see which hashtags are also helping generate viral posts. While it all takes time, you can usually uncover a few hashtags that match your content and piggyback on those trends.

5. Fuel Viral Views

Another tip that will help you grow an audience has to do with viral hits. If you look carefully at TikTok videos with phenomenal views (say, over one million), there are almost always hashtags involved. One reason is that hashtags make it easier to attract attention, either through searches or by joining other users.

An example of this is related to the top hashtag #springfashion. Buffer lists this as a top hashtag for apparel, and it’s easy to see why. In the spring, people are looking for new clothing that is light, colorful and breezy. It wouldn’t make sense to use the hashtag in the fall or winter, but if you are an influencer trying to draw attention to a specific brand or clothing line, you can join the throngs who are using that hashtag. There’s a lesson in timing here as well. Some hashtags will work during specific times of the year. You will see plenty of trending hashtags in late summer related to NFL football as an example, but not as many for basketball.

6. Use Hashtags In Comments

This hashtag tip is a little surprising but also effective. In most cases, you will end up using hashtags in your TikTok post to increase engagement and views, but you can also use them in comments. Not only does this work because of the discoverability, it also gives you more flexibility.

As noted already, you don’t want to use more than about five hashtags. If you do, the algorithm might penalize you and assume the post is too spammy. An alternative is to engage in comments with users and add hashtags there, which won’t count against the word count limit. Yet, the hashtag will still make the post more visible in search. Apart from helping with that, hashtags in comments help with community building as you reinforce your topics. For example, if you are posting about cars and then engage with followers, adding hashtags in the comments lets your users know you are still on brand and on message.

7. Target Your Audience With Hashtags

One tip that is not necessarily intuitive, especially considering all of the other advice about how to use hashtags so far, is that you can target your audience with them as well. This has a few interesting benefits, such as establishing a community, making posts more searchable and engaging with specific groups.

Let’s say you are a small business just starting out. The tendency is to use a hashtag about your business, such as #toysforpetsdotcom or #pettoys. That’s a wise strategy and can help fuel growth. However, you might also try hashtags that are related to your customers and target demographic. Here’s another example of how that works. Let’s say you want to target new pet owners for your business. You might try a hashtag such as #newpetowners or #lovemypet because you are then switching tactics. You’re not trying to engage on a topic but rather a group of people, some who are likely to respond to that hashtag.

8. Keep Experimenting

Hashtags are a little hard to predict in terms of what will work and how to use them effectively. That’s why one last tip is related to posting consistently and routinely. It’s best to keep trying a few tactics to see what works and to generate quite a few posts (as many as 3-4 per day) with different hashtags.

It’s important to stay the course. What might work with one post could end up not working the very next week, depending on viral trends, how people are searching and even a few unpredictable factors like the news of the day. Influencers know that you have to keep trying to see what works, and to post often enough that you can learn from the analytics, engagement and viral success. When you do see a post gain some traction, you can then start using that hashtag more, which creates a snowball effect. Eventually, you can carve out a niche with a few hashtags that you “own” and that are producing the growth metrics you like to see.

Safe to say, there are now millions of hashtags in use, competing in some ways with website domains. One estimate is that a new hashtag is created every second. They are also impossible to track, mostly because of the sheer number and how they are used across all social media platforms.

That should not discourage you, though. As mentioned, you can create a niche hashtag to drive engagement and build a community while also choosing popular hashtags to draw in a crowd. You will find hashtags in every category imaginable, from tech to gaming to car insurance. Just a few popular hashtags include:

#FYP
#foryoupage
#viral
#trendingnow
#tiktoktrend
#exploremore
#mustwatch
#tiktokchallenge
#trendslab
#foryou

TikTok itself tracks popular hashtags and you can uncover them quite easily for use in your posts. Know that they tend to change on a daily basis, but here’s a link to help you get started. A few trending TikTok hashtags over the last six months include:

#tiktoklive
#kpop
#growagarden
#backtoschool
#taylorswift
#relationships
#spiderman
#dc
#relaxing
#nabdraft

Bottom Line

The main takeaway here is that hashtags can drive views, engagement and follower growth. It’s unlikely a post will go viral unless it jumps on the bandwagon of a popular hashtag. You can choose one to build your own community but mix and match with trending hashtags as well for the best growth.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

A good rule of thumb with hashtags is to include about five or less. If you add more than that, you may find the post won’t gain as much traction or engagement as the TikTok algorithm marks your video as too spammy. It can also confuse followers who are quickly scrolling through their feed if they see a paragraph full of hashtags.

It also doesn’t help that much with discoverability if you add more than five hashtags. It helps to pick one or two that are in a broad category and then focus on your niche. That way you are showing up when people search for a general topic and when they search for your category.

As you might expect, some topics and themes have a much higher potential for reach than others. Fashion, gaming, and technology tend to blow up on TikTok quite often, whereas you might find topics like real estate and insurance to be less popular.

As you can imagine, using a hashtag generator is a smart idea because it allows you to explore which ones are trending and also if you can carve out a niche of your own. One recent AI-powered hashtag generator is called HootSuite OwlyGPT and it’s incredibly useful. The service can use real-time data on apps like TikTok to suggest hashtags and allows you to explore options that will help fuel growth.

While not meant specifically for TikTok, OwlyGPT does the hard work of hashtag research. The only catch here is that this is a paid service, apart from any subscription fees you are already paying to use HootSuite as a social media manager.

As a free alternative that is targeted more for TikTok users, consider trying the Ahrefs TikTok Hashtag Generator. To use it, you just copy and paste your caption and then the service will kick out a few hashtags to consider. You can choose the one you want to use, such as formal or confident.

Adding hashtags to a new video post is easy and intuitive. First you need to make the content of course, such as recording a video of your kids hamming it up. Once the video is ready, create a new TikTok post and add the caption you want to use. You have 2,200 characters to work with (up from the previous limit of 300 characters). In your caption, type # and then the hashtag you want to use. You can add them anywhere you want, but many users tend to add them at the end of the caption to keep the flow of the caption. You can go back and add a hashtag to scheduled or posted videos as well, just by editing the caption.

This is where third party tools like HootSuite and Buffer can help, because as you create posts, you can also add hashtags. Some tools like Sprout Social even allow you to research hashtags and pick one that is trending. As with just about anything related to social media, it’s a good idea to experiment. Try using just one or two hashtags, or add up to five, and then check the analytics to see which posts are performing the best.

In the end, hashtags are useful because they drive engagement and can increase your chances of a post going viral. You can easily add them to any post and see how they impact performance. For those who are trying to make money as an influencer, hashtags can be the secret sauce to higher views.

Not every hashtag is useful or even desired. In fact, some hashtags are downright offensive. Fortunately, there’s a way to block a hashtag, which is effective because it means you won’t see that post altogether in your feed. It means hashtags have even more power than expected in helping filter out content (in addition to the main point of helping people find trending content).

Blocking a hashtag can filter out inappropriate content or even just control what you see in your feed. Don’t like sports? You can search for the most popular sports-related hashtags and then block them so you don’t see that content. Want to lessen the chance of seeing posts about politics? Same procedure.

The steps to blocking are fairly straightforward. First go to your profile page and select the Settings hamburger menu and choose Settings and Privacy, then choose Content Preferences. Look for the Filter Keywords option. Choose the Add Keyword option and add any hashtags you want to filter out. Of course, you can also go back and remove any keywords or hashtags you’ve blocked if you decide to make changes.

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