What actually helps therapists get found on Instagram
Hashtags used to be the main route to new audiences. They aren't any more. Instagram now leans on keyword search, and on how people respond to your content. So the most useful things you can do are mostly not hashtags at all:
- —Put your specialism and location in your profile name field — for example 'Sam Patel | Anxiety Therapist Leeds'.
- —Write captions that naturally include the words people search: 'anxiety', 'online therapy', your town.
- —Add alt text to images describing what's in them.
- —Make posts people want to save and share — clear, useful psychoeducation tends to do best.
- —Then add three to five specific hashtags as a final layer — five is Instagram's maximum per post.
Broad versus specific hashtags
Huge tags like #mentalhealth have millions of posts, so yours disappears within minutes. Smaller, specific tags — a specialism plus a place, or a modality — reach fewer people, but the right ones. For a therapy practice, the right hundred people matter far more than a passing thousand.
Keep going
Our guide to hashtags for therapists covers strategy in more depth. For the captions themselves, use our mental health caption bank, and for the bigger picture read Instagram for therapists. If you'd rather someone else handled it, see our social media management for therapists.