How to Use Emoji Hashtags on Instagram

Instagram just brought two of the biggest social media trends together and combined them into one: emoji hashtags.

If you're active on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or any other popular social network, then you probably already know that hashtagging involves placing a pound sign (#) in front of a word (or phrase without spaces). When you do this and publish it in a status, tweet, caption, comment or whatever else, the word or phrase turns into a clickable link, which takes you to a page where you can follow other updates containing that same hashtag.

Read more about hashtags here.

Emoji are those little Japanese picture icons people use to compliment their written text content on social media and in text messages. Most people use them on a mobile device because emoji keyboards come already installed (or can be downloaded).

You can find out more interesting facts about emoji here.

So, emoji hashtags? If you're a little confused, don't worry. Once you take a minute or so to browse through the following slides of screenshots, you'll know exactly how to use them.

 Click through to the next slide to see how it's done.

The first thing you can do is add an emoji hashtag to the caption of your photo or video post.

To do that, simply type the '#' symbol and then switch to your emoji keyboard so you can type the emoji of your choice to add right next to it, without spaces. If you want, you can add multiple emoji in a single hashtag, and even combine it with words.

For example, you could type '#' and then tap the pizza emoji three times (or as many times as you want.) You could also start typing '#pizza' and then add the pizza emoji to the end of it.

• What are the most popular emoji?

When you're happy with the emoji hashtag you chose, you can go ahead and post or photo or video. That emoji hashtag will turn into a tappable link, which will display a feed of all the other posts from people who included that exact same emoji hashtag.

Note: Instagram has banned the eggplant emoji from being used as a hashtag, due to it being commonly used in a sexually suggestive manner.

Hashtags have always worked in comments left on Instagram posts, so they work for emoji hashtags too.

• How to track comments on Instagram
• How to track hashtags on Instagram

All you have to do is follow the tips outlined in the previous slide, but instead of typing your emoji hashtag in your photo or video caption before you post it to your feed, you can post it in the comment section of other users' posts or your own posts.

Last but not least, the last way you can take advantage of emoji hashtags on Instagram is by navigating to the search tab (marked by the magnifying glass icon in the bottom menu) and using the search field at the top.

Tap the search field to begin your search, and make sure you tap "Hashtags" so that it's highlighted in blue (as opposed to "People"). From there, simply type the emoji into the search field, without typing the '#' before it.

For example, typing a single pizza emoji into the search field brought up almost 7,000 post results when I searched for it. Tapping it takes me to the feed of all the posts that contain the pizza emoji hashtag.

Want to know the most common mistakes people make when using emoji? Check out these 10 emoji that most people often get mixed up.