Bar Hashtags: Ideas To Help You Become the Toast of the Town

Bars have a limited window of opportunity to sell their drinks. Alcoholic beverages are, after all, an indulgence mostly reserved for celebrations, certain hours of the day and nights of the week, and even certain moods. Maximizing sales during peak times is crucial for any drinking establishment or even for restaurants and hotels with a bar section or alcohol menu. Using bar hashtags is one of the easiest and most effective ways to keep those drinks — and your sales — flowing.

Driving Business and Merrymaking With Hashtags

If you’re running a popular bar with a regular influx of customers and reliable sales day in and day out, you may feel that you don’t have a need to establish an online presence for your business, much less make use of bar hashtags for targeted marketing. But who wouldn’t want to have new customers and more business? Keep in mind that every day, countless young adults reach legal age and celebrate with drinks and via social media posts. How do you help these potential new customers — who belong to the social media generation — learn about your business?

With more than 1 billion active users per month, Instagram gives businesses access to a vastly huge customer base and numerous opportunities to promote their brand and products/services for free. Hashtags have evolved to become a highly effective tool for targeted marketing, accompanying the endless stream of posts on the platform.

Most of your customers, both young and not-so-young, are probably posting photos of your drinks and themselves while in your bar, pub, or lounge, and using bar hashtags. User-generated content built around hashtags relevant to your business is just one of the many opportunities you can and should take advantage of to strengthen your business’ reputation online and stay competitive in your community and industry.

Whether you’re new to Instagram or have been managing a page for your establishment for a while, an effective hashtag strategy is one of the key tools you should have in your arsenal — much like a best-selling cocktail recipe is a must in any drinks menu.

How To Use Instagram Hashtags

You can use bar hashtags and other relevant hashtags in the caption or comments section of a regular feed post, or as superimposed text in Stories. Each hashtag you use places the associated post on the corresponding hashtag page, or the page where all photos and videos that use the same hashtag are collected. You can also edit the caption of an existing post to add or remove hashtags from it. Numbers and emojis are allowed in hashtags, but spaces and special characters cannot be used. Capitalization does not affect hashtag searchability.

Remember that while you can make up your own hashtag, as many people are wont to do, your unique bar hashtag won’t serve the purpose of boosting the visibility of your post if you’re the only one using it, as users won’t be searching for content using that hashtag. However, you should absolutely create a branded hashtag for your business. It will help you increase and strengthen brand awareness as long as you use it all the time to familiarize your target audience with it.

The Hows of Creating Bar Hashtags for Better Engagement

Posting enticing photos of your beverages, your Instagrammable interiors, or your high-spirited customers (pun intended) is not enough to get the attention of your target audience on Instagram. You need to know the best bar hashtags to use for different types of content and content format to make sure that your content is shown to the right audience and to increase your brand’s discoverability. If you’re operating a restaurant with a bar or a dedicated alcohol menu, you should also familiarize yourself with the best restaurant hashtags to use on your social media pages.

Tips and Tricks When Using Bar Hashtags

Here are some tips and tricks to help you develop a great hashtag strategy and the best possible combination of bar hashtags for your Instagram content.

• You can use up to 30 hashtags in a regular post and up to 10 in Stories. One study revealed that pages with 1,000 or fewer followers get the most interaction when using 11 hashtags; the latest consensus is that 3-5 hashtags are enough.
• Use a variety of hashtags, both generic hashtags with a high volume of use, moderately popular hashtags, niche hashtags with a lower volume of use, and your brand hashtag. Include seasonal hashtags, event hashtags, promotional hashtags, awareness hashtags, and other special hashtags whenever appropriate.
• When choosing bar hashtags based on the same keyword, always opt for the keyword phrases with the highest volume of use. For example, #bartender and #bartenderlife have the highest volume of use; you can skip the other hashtags with the base keyword “bartender” in them so you can make room for hashtags that use other relevant keywords.
• When using special hashtags, such as hashtags for certain awareness campaigns, or trending hashtags related to a developing event, make sure the hashtags are still relevant to your content and your brand. Don’t just use popular hashtags just for the purpose of jumping on the bandwagon and nothing else.
• Find out which bar hashtags are popular among your target audience or frequently searched by them. You can do this by checking out the pages of your competitors and scrolling through their posts and their followers’ posts and comments.
• Regularly review your Instagram Insights to find out how your hashtag strategy is doing and what changes you need to make to optimize it for better targeting and engagement.

Examples of Best Hashtags for Bars

Below are the most popular hashtags for bars.

1. #bar, with 44.9M+ posts
2. #wine, with 71M+ posts; #winelover, with 16M+ posts; #winetasting, with 12M+ posts; #winetime, with 8.8M+ posts; wineoclock, with 4.3M+ posts; #winewednesday, with 1.6M+ posts
3. #cocktails, with 34.9M+ posts; #cocktailsofinstagram, with 1.9M+ posts; #craftcocktails, with 2.6M+ posts
4. #happyhour, with 18.6M+ posts
5. #drinks, with 52M+ posts; #drinkstagram, with 3.8M+ posts
6. #weekend, with 154M+ posts; #weekendvibes, with 31.9M+ posts; #weekendmood, with 4.5M+ posts
7. #bartender, with 9.3M+ posts; #bartenderlife, with 2.6M+ posts
8. #beer, with 81M+ posts; #beerstagram, with 11M+ posts; #beerporn, with 9.5M+ posts; #beerlover, with 7.2M+ posts; #beergeek, with 6.2M+ posts
9. #happy, with 690M+ posts; #happybirthday, with 115M+ posts; #happynewyear, with 53M+ posts; #happyday, with 30M+ posts; #happybirthdaytome, with 10M+ posts; #happylife, with 17M+ posts; #happyanniversary, with 5.3M+ posts
10. #friends, with 400M+ posts; #friendship, with 72.7M+ posts; #friendshipgoals, with 18M+ posts; #friendsforever, with 13M+ posts
11. #craftbeer, with 34M+ posts; #craftbeerlife, with 3.5M+ posts; #craftbeerlover, with 3.7M+ posts; #craftbeerporn, with 3.6M+ posts; #craftbeergeek, with 1.2M+ posts
12. #local, with 26M+ posts; #localbusiness, with 15.5M+ posts; #localbrand, with 6.4M+ posts; #supportlocal, with 41.5M+ posts

Here are more bar hashtags you can use for various types of content related to alcoholic beverages.

1. #whiskey, with 10.3M+ posts
2. #gin, with 10.6M+ posts
3. #rum, with 5.7M+ posts
4. #tequila, with 9.6M+ posts
5. #liquor, with 4.3M+ posts
6. #thirsty, with 4.4M+ posts; #thirstythursday, with 4M+ posts
7. #shots, with 9M+ posts
8. #drinkup, with 4.8M+ posts
9. #slurp, with 2M+ posts
10. #glass, with 17.9M+ posts
11. #goodtimes, with 68.7M+ posts
12. #party, with 188M+ posts; #partytime, with 16.8M+ posts
13. #nightlife, with 28.7M+ posts
14. #mixology, with 6.3M+ posts
15. #pub, with 12M+ posts
16. #dinner, with 120M+ posts; #dinnertime, with 10M+ posts; #dinnerparty, with 1.5M+ posts; #dinnerisserved, with 1.1M+ posts
17. #nightout, with 25M+ posts
18. #instanight, with 2.6M+ posts

Encourage Word-Of-Mouth Promotion of Your Business With Bar Hashtags and a Great Guest WiFi Experience

Providing guest WiFi access to customers allows them to share their experience in their socials in real time. You can even influence their posts by displaying various bar hashtags they can use with their photos and videos. Of course, don’t forget to include your branded hashtag and to remind them to tag your business.

With a fully customizable WiFi system, like Beambox, you can do more than just provide free internet connectivity to your customers. Beambox is a sophisticated WiFi marketing platform that allows you to enhance the guest WiFi experience and gives you access to a variety of tools to help you boost business, as well as your Instagram presence.

Beambox offers a number of ways to make your WiFi network work to your advantage while meeting your customers’ connectivity needs. You can limit WiFi access within designated parameters around your establishment, or control download speeds and sizes; you can display targeted content to promote a product or drive more followers to your social media via a customized captive portal login; use intelligent marketing tools to harness valuable customer data and have a better understanding of the people who patronize your business; and you can automatically prompt customers to leave a review online.

Beambox is an all-in-one WiFi solution that accomplishes all of the above and more. We have an existing client base of over 3,000 venues, and our customizable WiFi marketing solutions have been used in impressive and rewarding ways. You can drive sales with time-sensitive deals and promos for your restaurant, boost social engagement through Instagram or Facebook contests, and climb up on online ranking platforms through real-time customer reviews. Accelerate your business growth — start your Beambox free trial today!

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