Facebook may be your “parents” social media preference, but it is still the world’s largest social media site, with over 3 billion monthly active users. You can reach a massive audience on the platform, and hashtags may help.
If you don’t use hashtags already because they’re time-consuming to find, we’re going to share the best Facebook hashtag generator tools that help you:
- Find popular tags
- Narrow tags to your niche
- Leverage hashtags in your posts
Facebook remains a social media powerhouse, and hashtags allow you to boost your reach – even slightly.
We’re going to explain everything there is to know about hashtags and a few tools that you can use to generate your own hashtags for the platform.
What are Facebook Hashtags?
Facebook introduced hashtags back in 2013 – yes, it’s been a long time – and the idea was to have a way for people to search for content and categorize it.
It’s an easy way for people to find your content, and it also helps Facebook’s algorithm better understand your content.
A few points to keep in mind, and this comes directly from Facebook’s Help Center, are:
- Hashtags must be a single word – no spaces
- Special characters and any form of punctuation won’t work
And only posts that are shared with you are seen when you search a hashtag. If you don’t have a public account and create a post with hashtags, only people following you will see them. So, if you want to maximize your exposure using hashtags, be sure that your account and posts are public.
A hashtag is any text in a post that has “#” before it in a single word.
Who Should Use Facebook Hashtags?
Anyone. You might be leery of using hashtags because people have told you that “they’re irrelevant,” but that’s simply not true. If you have private posts, you can skip hashtags. Otherwise, they can help you get more followers on Facebook.
But you want to use hashtags when they’re:
- Appropriate to the post
- Help categorize the post
- Add some value
If you add the hashtag “#dogs” to a post that is talking about food or doesn’t have a dog in it, you’re just spamming and defeating the purpose of hashtags.
How to Find Hashtags to Use on Facebook
You want to try using hashtags, but how do you find them? Facebook hashtag generator tools are what we recommend because they help make it much easier to find tags for your posts. But if you don’t want to bother with tools, you can find them by:
- Opening Facebook
- Clicking the search icon
- Typing in “#HASHTAG”
You’ll replace the #HASHTAG with the hashtag you want to search, such as “#cake” or whatever it is you’re searching. Facebook will then recommend tags for you, such as:
- #cake with 42m posts and 5k follows
- #cakedesign with 9.1m posts and 1.9k follows
Using this method, you can then find hashtags and add them to the posts that you make.
But you can also do this right inside of the post textbox on Facebook. For example:
- Open Facebook
- Tap in the Create post box
- Type something and put #A
You’ll begin seeing all of the recommendations and number of posts for a hashtag starting with the letter “A.” Remember, you can swap out the A for any seed keyword that you like and will be shown hashtags that you can add.
But for times when you don’t know what hashtags to use and don’t know the seed keywords to begin using, tools can help. Hashtag generator tools take the guesswork out of your hashtags so that you can begin using them quickly in your posts.
9 Facebook Hashtag Generator Tools
We’ve covered a lot of great information on hashtags up until this point, but now it’s time to begin looking at a few tools that you can begin using to find Facebook hashtags. The following tool options are popular and worth checking out:
1. All Hashtag
All Hashtag is an easy-to-use generator tool that you can begin using to find hashtags that are:
- Popular
- Random
- Live
You don’t need to sign up. Just plug in your seed keyword into the text box and allow the platform to generate hashtags for you. We typed the keyword “Dogs” into the box and were provided with 30 hashtags that we could use.
And you can easily copy the hashtags and put them into your post.
The “Random” option is a lot of fun and allows you to view hashtags that you may not have even thought of using before. Our main complaint is that there are ads everywhere on the site, which impacts usability.
2. RiteTag
RiteTag has a nicer interface than All Hashtag, and you’ll find that it has apps for Android, iOS and even Google Chrome.
- Buffer
- Later
- SproutSocial
- Tons of others
You can sign up for a seven-day free trial, and you’ll gain access to a suite of tools that will help you enhance your social media presence.
3. HashtagMeNow
Generate hashtags in seconds with this minimalistic site that shows you popular hashtags and makes it simple to copy them. For example, typing in “dog,” I found hashtags for:
- Puppies
- Doglover
- Puppylove
- Dogsofinstagram
And multiple lists are available. Unfortunately, no information is available on how popular these hashtags are, so you’re left guessing which ones to add.
4. HashAtIt
HashAtIt’s interface looks a lot like Google’s, which is a nice change from some of the other tools that have a lot of “clutter.” And when you add in your tag, it acts differently than any tool on the list.
You’ll find posts are listed in tiles that use these hashtags, and you can filter for them to just include “Facebook.
Users can then click on each post and see what other tags the poster used. While the platform still works, it does seem to stop showing Facebook’s newest posts. When mentioning “dogs,” there are posts from 2022 and before – nothing recent.
5. Brand Mentions
Brand Mentions has a free tool to help you find hashtags, but they will try to upsell you on their service – which gets annoying. Searching does take some time, and the platform will tell you things, such as:
- Extracting from blogs
- Extracting from Instagram, Facebook, etc.
- Analyzing sentiment
And after a minute or so, you’ll see how many shares, likes and interactions that the hashtag received. You’ll be able to see the context in mentions, reach, media wall and more. However, most of the data is locked behind a free trial.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the world’s most popular social media scheduling tools, and it’s filled with generators to attract new users. The hashtag generator allows you to use AI to find hashtags, but it does require you to add in a ton of information:
- Social platform
- Description
- Language
- Hashtags
What is nice is that you can upload a photo and Hootsuite will use AI to try to figure out what hashtags to use.
The downside?
With all of the advanced features, there’s no easy way to copy hashtags or explore them further. If you do sign up for the platform, you can then generate an unlimited number of hashtags. While pricing years ago used to be affordable, the cheapest plan is now $99 a month – too high for just hashtags.
7. Later
Later is a popular social media management tool that you can use to get Facebook hashtag suggestions. The tool helps you find relevant tags in two ways:
- You can search for a hashtag and generate related suggestions, OR
- You can get suggestions based on your post’s caption
With the search-based suggestions option, the platform will generate up to 30 relevant tags at once. The only drawback here is that you’ll need to be on one of Later’s more expensive plans if you want to get suggestions based on your post captions.
8. HashtagExpert
HashtagExpert is an app for iOS users, and it is a premier option for small businesses. You can find hashtags for a variety of platforms, target by country and language and Pro is very affordable.
You’ll enjoy the analytics tools and guides that are also provided.
If you want to customize your hashtag patterns, you can do so right inside of the app – a nice touch.
9. Hashtagify
Hashtagify doesn’t “technically” offer a tool just for Facebook, but you can use their Instagram tool to achieve the same results. You’ll need to sign up for free to give it a try, and the one thing about this service is that it offers:
- Real-time stats
- Related hashtags
- Amazing interface
You’ll be able to see how popular a tag is, when it’s popular and also popular trends. If you need a simple Facebook hashtag generator, this is not the best option for you. But it is a great choice for users who love using data to make smarter decisions when posting on Facebook.
7 Tips to Use Facebook Hashtags More Effectively
Hashtags help categorize content on Facebook and tell the algorithm what your content is all about. And like other social platforms, they need to be used properly to maximize their benefits.
These 7 tips will help you start using hashtags more effectively on Facebook.
1. Avoid Hashtags No One is Using
It may be tempting to use niche hashtags because you want Facebook to know what your content is about. But if you use hashtags that no one is looking for, you won’t get any traffic to your posts.
For example, the hashtag #sohappytobeherewithgrandmatoday is really descriptive and gives people a clear idea of what’s going on in your video or image. But guess what? No one is searching for that hashtag. That means that your post won’t appear on pages of more popular hashtags.
Instead, you may want to use the hashtags #happy and #grandma instead, as these are more popular hashtags. Focusing on more popular hashtags will help your post get more exposure.
How do you find popular hashtags?
- Open the Facebook app.
- Start typing a hashtag in the search bar. For example, type: #trending.
- A list will pop up with hashtags that contain your keyword.
- Underneath each result, you can see how many posts contain that hashtag. For example, the hashtag #trendingsongs has 15 million posts.
2. Use 2-3 Hashtags Per Post
You know that hashtags can be beneficial, but how many should you add? Should you go crazy and add as many as possible to get more exposure? No!
In 2024, less is more when it comes to hashtags, and that rule applies to most social media platforms.
Aim to add 2-3 hashtags per post. Using just a few hashtags will allow you to reach your target audience without your post looking spammy.
3. Skip Spaces for Multi-Word Hashtags
To use hashtags properly, you have to get the formatting right. If you want to use a hashtag with multiple words, make sure that you’re not putting spaces between the words.
Every hashtag must be written as a single word. For hashtags with multiple words, simply capitalize the first letter of each word: #JustLikeThis.
4. Skip the Symbols
Here’s something that some Facebook users don’t know about hashtags: you can’t add special characters, like % or *.
Make sure that all of your hashtags only use letters and numbers.
5. Join in on Conversations or Trends
Is something trending on Facebook? You can use hashtags to join in on the conversation and drive more traffic to your posts.
Make sure that you’re adding something valuable to the conversation if you’re going to use this strategy.
It’s not easy to find trending topics and hashtags on Facebook. However, you can use the News tab to see which articles and topics are getting the most attention, and then add relevant hashtags to join the conversation.
6. Incorporate Your Hashtags into Sentences
Most people add hashtags to the end of their posts after their text. But if you want to use your tags more naturally, try incorporating them into your sentences.
When you add hashtags into your sentences naturally, your posts won’t look spammy and you avoid saying the same thing more than once.
7. Run Facebook Insights to Understand If Your Hashtags are Working
It’s common for brands and influencers to use the same hashtags over and over again when publishing new posts. While this isn’t a bad strategy, it’s important to make sure that the tags you’ve been using are actually working.
If you’re not tracking the performance of your hashtags, then you have no way of knowing whether they’re really giving you more exposure or driving more engagement.
The great news is that you can use Facebook Insights to see what’s working and what’s not.
Here’s how:
- Log into your Meta Business Suite account.
- Click the Insights tab.
Here, you can review the performance of the hashtags you’re using. Take the time to analyze:
- Your organic reach
- Your engagement rates
Are you getting the level of engagement you expected? If you want to drive more traffic to your site, are your hashtags helping you achieve that goal?
If your hashtags aren’t really doing anything to improve your engagement or site traffic, then it may be time to switch things up.
Conclusion
Facebook hashtags don’t get as much attention as hashtags on other social platforms, but they’re still important.
Like on other platforms, the right hashtags can drive more engagement to your posts, help you get more traffic to your site and expand your reach. But make sure that you’re following the best practices above to maximize the benefits of this engagement tool.
