Are you using banned hashtags? Here is how to avoid them!

June 20, 2024
Social Media

Hashtags on social media are great tools for getting organic reach. Whether the platform is Twitter, Instagram, or another, almost each of them gives quite a possible reach to those using hashtags in posts.

While hashtags do not guarantee that your post will be accessed by as many people as possible, you won’t want to underestimate their potential.

It is like the urge not to miss out on those free features platforms offer in this era of paid marketing.

Thus, whenever posting content on social media, we make sure to add hashtags- if not many, at least one or two.

However, using the wrong hashtag is also harmful. If you don’t know, each platform has some restricted hashtags, and therefore, using them shadow bans the account.

Chances are you also unknowingly use such hashtags, which can affect the health of your social presence.

If you are curious about how to identify those hashtags and find the right one, this article will help.

Keep reading!

How to avoid the banned hashtags?

There are many ways to search for hashtags a social platform has restricted. Let us see them one by one.

Search for hashtags manually

The simplest method is to search them manually.

Social platforms usually don’t give the “follow” option for banned hashtags.

That means searching for any specific hashtag on the platform will clarify if it is worth using.

For example, when you search #fashion on Instagram, you will see a follow option next to it.

However, in the case of #always, the follow button doesn’t appear below it because the platform has banned it.

Use the hashtag ban checker tool

If you think searching for every single hashtag manually is time-consuming, you can do that in bulk through third-party banned hashtag checkers. To search for different social platforms, such tools are abundant; you can easily find them on Google with a simple query.

They are easy to use. Most of them ask you for the list of hashtags you want to confirm about the ban. In response, the tool simply answers with “yes” or “no”. Moreover, they also suggest other relevant hashtags in place of banned ones if your list consists of any.

For instance, ayrshare.com is a banned hashtag-checking tool for Instagram. We gave it our list of hashtags with separate commas, and it extracted the result showing “YES” next to the hashtags that are literally banned.

However, for hashtags like “digital marketing” or “social media marketing company”, it says “NO,” which shows a green flag for their use.

Besides this tool, several other are available that you may find convenient. To name a few-

Scan your social handle

So far, we have discussed searching for hashtags before posting them. But if any of your existing posts contain negative hashtags you are unaware of, they will somehow gradually affect your social presence, which you might notice but won’t know the reason.

As you now know, the best way out is to scan your social handle to identify banned hashtags and eliminate their risk. Many tools are also available for that. Some are free, while most of them come with paid versions.

We used spikerz.com to scan our social profiles and learn about shadow-ban risk.

Simply, we entered our social username, and the tool started processing information. Once done, based on the last ten posts, the tool found no posts that contained any banned hashtags.

If in case there were any, the tool offers a premium for detailed analysis. You can simply subscribe to it and remove all negative hashtags from your profile based on the final report.

Final Note

Shadow ban on social media is a serious matter as it negatively impacts reach and, consequently, engagement even if you fail to notice it initially. In this scenario, the “prevention is better than the cure” approach works the best. When negative or banned hashtags become the reason for shadow-banning your account, many other reasons are also responsible for this. However, as far as it is about negative hashtags, the tips given in this article are more than enough to deal with this.

For overall health, the best thing is to constantly stay informed about the community guidelines of the platform you are using. That is because platforms keep changing them for certain reasons or past or present events. Moreover, social algorithms mostly keep an eye on content involving hate speech or violence; however, for other reasons, they also keep allowing or disallowing certain things, including hashtags.

We hope the article helps you find the information you were looking for. If you are a business looking for social media marketing services or any consultancy, you can talk to our experts. They will be happy to help you.