Best food hashtags – hashtags for restaurants, bars & food industry

If you’re doing social media for your restaurant, you may have heard how important hashtags are – especially on Instagram and Twitter.

Instagram is particularly important for you as a food business owner – as people ‘eat with their eyes‘ – beautiful photos of food you serve in your restaurant are the best way to promote it:

What is the best way to get your scrumptious photos of food from your restaurant in front of the right audience, hungry for inspiration where to eat next?

In this post, we have collected the most popular food hashtags, hashtags for restaurants, bars and food industry for you – together with the number of posts, and explained how to use hashtags for your restaurant/bar/food business on the different social media.

So let’s dig in!

What are hashtags?

Hashtags are keyword tags used by all social media to determine the content of your post. Hashtags also make your content searchable by keyword to users.

Nowadays, everyone is using hashtags, but few people actually do it right.  And overusing hashtags or using the wrong ones can actually be harmful for your business – and even lead your  account to be blocked (read more about it in our earlier post on banned hashtags ).

And to make it even more tricky – hashtags don’t work the same way on different social media. We have actually wrote separate posts on how hashtags work on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter – but let’s sum up the main takeaways about Instagram hashtags here.

There are two types of hashtags on Instagram:

•  Top Posts  –   posts that are trending (most popular) in the first 2 hours of posting – by likes and comments;
• and Most Recent Posts – latest posts arranged chronologically;

Depending on the strength of your following – it may be more or less difficult for you to ‘compete’ for a spot in the ‘Top Posts’ or in the Most Recent posts for very popular hashtags – as they require thousands of likes to put you on top/  fill with new content very quickly with new content.

So if you’re only just beginning your adventure with social media, especially Instagram – go for less popular hashtags as well.

What is the best number of hashtags to use?

Use all the 30 hashtags (that’s the limit). But make sure you only use those that describe your photo, are relevant and (somewhat) popular.

Where should your hashtags be places? 

You can place your hashtags both in your post or in the first comment (no difference for organic reach).

Hashtag strategy for restaurants

First of all, as a restaurant, you need to focus on different criteria:

• content of your photo – e.g. #cheesecake #raspberry
• type of food you serve – e.g. #pastries #dessert
• popular related food hashtags e.g. #baking #dmtoorder #sweettooth #indulge
• geolocation – place where your restaurant is located/ your caption area (very important for any physical business!) e.g. #bedfordstreet
• your business name – e.g. #bedfordstreetbakery (also @tag your profile)
• your audience – hashtags showing your understanding of trends (and where your potential clients hang out) e.g. #foodporn

Food hashtags for different social media*

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Now that we know the principles behind using hashtags for restaurants and food business, let’s have a look at the most popular hashtags for different social media.

We did not include hashtags for Facebook and Twitter, as they have relatively little impact for the restaurant business.

Food hashtags for Instagram