Did you know that the health and wellness industry generates around $4.2 trillion worldwide according to the Global Wellness Institute? It’s a fast-growing market and an industry that includes sectors like personal care, beauty, wellness tourism, fitness and public health, among others. Anyone creating content that falls into the “health” category could be talking about any number of topics, including medicine, disease prevention, fitness, nutrition and more.
For content creators and brands who want to break through information overload to reach their audience, using the right hashtags is essential. We rounded up the top benefits and best practices for health hashtag use to help get you started on the right foot. We’ve also identified some of the top health hashtags out there for you to consider adding to your content.
Benefits of Using Health Hashtags
If you’re new to social media marketing, the whole hashtag practice may seem a little foreign at first. These labels help funnel content into specific topics, which could increase your visibility beyond your current followers to build your brand and expand awareness. Hashtags can be single words, combinations of words and even brand names. Benefits of using health hashtags include the following:
- Building your following and increasing viewership
- Establishing branding and increase brand awareness
- Connecting you with new customers and weaving your content into new conversations
- Using relevant health hashtags to evaluate what people are talking about most right now
- Tailoring your content accordingly for a boost in engagement, conversions and sales
- When readers see relevant, interesting content, they’ll spend time reading and looking through it
Best Practices for Using Health Hashtags
When used correctly, hashtags can boost your engagement rate and increase your visibility. But for creators and brands that don’t follow best practices, using hashtags can actually hurt their stats. Choosing spammy or banned hashtags can keep you out of your audience’s feeds altogether. Likewise, overusing hashtags and only using the most popular ones can prevent you from reaping the rewards.
Effectively using health hashtags requires a little planning. First, make sure you’re using hashtags that connect your content with the audience who will most benefit from it. Best practices include:
- Relevance: Your content has to be relevant and unique. You shouldn’t expect any less from your hashtags. They should be specific and relevant to your content and your audience to get the best
- Be Platform Specific: Your hashtag strategy should be nuanced to tailor it to the platform you’re publishing on. For example, Instagram allows you to use up to 30, but most experts suggest using fewer than 11. Use fewer than two for anything on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook.
- Mix it Up: The top performers in any category open you up to a huge audience. But that reward comes with stiff competition since so many others are using the same hashtag too. Don’t shy away from smaller health hashtags that are laser-focused on your niche. Combining top performers with lower volume hashtags increases the odds of getting seen.
Most Popular Health Hashtags
Thanks largely to the advent of social media marketing, there’s no shortage of opportunities to share health and wellness products and services. From bloggers to influencers to brands, platforms like Instagram have expanded the health and wellness marketplace in a unique way. This allows content creators, marketers and brands to reach their audience effectively.
Using generic options like #health, which has more than 107 million Instagram posts, can work for a variety of content types. Or, you may want to choose some that are more in your niche. We rounded up top options in three categories: Wellness, fitness and healthcare.
Wellness Hashtags
Wellness is a fairly broad term that describes all the choices that people make to live happy, healthy, fulfilling lives. It may encompass topics like weight loss, fitness, nutrition, sustainable living and other social topics, just to name a few. Some of the most popular wellness hashtags include:
- #mindbodysoul: 2.5 million+ Instagram posts
- #cleanliving: More than 1.8 million Instagram posts
- #wellnessjourney: 1 million+ Instagram posts
- #nourishyourself: More than 440,000 Instagram posts
Fitness Hashtags
The fitness industry continues to be among the hottest, with an estimated worth of around $30 billion according to Forbes. For brands and creators who want to share fitness journeys, tools, products and ideas, these are some of the most popular hashtags:
- #fitness: More than 366 million Instagram posts
- #gym: 175 million+ Instagram posts
- #fit: More than 148 million Instagram posts
- #fitfam: 107 million+ Instagram posts
Healthcare Hashtags
When you’re aiming content at the medical community, it’s crucial to keep your audience in mind. For example, #butyoudontlooksick targets the community talking about hidden disabilities and illnesses while #nurses and #medicalbilling are more specific to the practices and professions they describe. This underscores the importance of choosing the hashtags most relevant to your healthcare brand and content. Some top options run the gamut from general to very specific, including:
- #autism: More than 12 million Instagram posts
- #pain: 11 million+ Instagram posts
- #healthcare: More than 3.2 million Instagram posts
- #chronicillness: 2.5 million+ Instagram posts
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