Instagram Cycling Hashtags

Are you a cyclist on Instagram? Then you’ll want to know about the best instagram cycling hashtags to use when you post your photos.

#Hashtag What?

Quick recap for people who aren’t sure what a hashtag is. Think of it like a keyword that helps to describe or categorise your image. The beauty of hashtags is that they are clickable, and searchable, so that you can quickly pull up a feed of images tagged with a certain keyword.

Why is this useful?

Hashtags help you find images and more importantly, connect with the people who posted them, around specific themes. Let’s pretend we just got a new state of the art gizmo, and we wanted to a) show it off, and b) connect with other people who are into the same gizmos. Simply post an image using an appropriate hashtag and you’ll soon be attracting likes and follows from similarly minded gizmo fanciers.

The obvious, predictable cycling hashtags

Yes, of course you can use #cycling, #cycle, #cyclist and all are popular. But perhaps they’re too generic. How many people are regularly searching for images on generic topics? If you can get a bit more specific with your hashtags, the quality of the shots seems to go up. Plus, a major factor with high traffic hashtags is that your freshly posted image soon gets buried by all the incoming ones.

If you’re looking to connect with people in a meaningful way, then it makes sense to get a bit specific with your tags.

If you’re just looking to try to reach the maximum number of people, I’ve added in brackets the number of approx pics on instagram tagged against each hashtag, at the time of writing, February 2017.

I’ve also created a swipe file you can download for free, to quickly copy/paste the tags you want into your own instagram posts. More about that later…

Generic instagram cycling hashtags

These hashtags are all pretty generic to cycling and a general love of being a cyclist. They’re all hashtags that you’d probably be able to guess, even if you didn’t know they were popular. They’re obvious ones, in that sense.

I’ve ranked them in order, but the swipe file (download below) contains just the hashtags that you can copy/paste straight into your posts.

Be aware that there is always going to be some crossover between cycling and motorcyles, and the hashtags that tend to feature “bike” seem to have more motorcycle content.

Download the hashtag swipe file!

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Popular instagram cycling hastags that you wouldn’t intuitively be able to guess.

In case you’re wondering, WYMTM is short for What You Missed This Morning. WYMTE = What You Missed This Evening.

Instagram hashtags for cycling kit

What’s better than riding your bike? Looking great while you ride your bike! Here’s a selection of instagram cycling hashtags for showing off your kit.

Download the hashtag swipe file!

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Seasonal cycling hashtags

As cyclists, we get to enjoy the great outdoors the whole year round, and experience our environment in all its visual beauty. You really do see and experience so much more on a bike, and for season specific cycling photos, search these hashtags.

These hashtags are also used quite a bit by motorcyclists and horse riders! So they’re not exclusively cycling related.

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Instagram cycling hashtags for Photography

There are lots of instagram hashtags for cycling photos. Of course, all the hashtags are for photos really, but this set of hashtags is explicitly around pictures and photos, so naturally they are some of the most popular cycling hashtags you can use on instagram.

Download the hashtag swipe file!

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Humour

I wasn’t quite sure what to put the following tags into, so I decided on a “humour” category. If you know any other good ones, please add them in the comments and I’ll add them to this list.

#FOREVERBUTTPHOTOS (31K)
#SHOWUSYOURKITS (1K)
#WEIRDBIKE (0.5K)

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Cycle commuting hashtags on Instagram

If you’re looking for the top instagram hashtags for cycle commuting, then give these a go. Celebrate your cycle to work!

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Instagram hashtags for Cycle Touring

These hashtags for cycle touring routinely get a lot of posts:

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Instagram cycling hashtags for the Ladies

Like many of the cycle / bike hashtags, there are often overlaps between motorcycles and bicycles. As you might expect, some of the most popular instagram cycling accounts are run by attractive women, and it’s easy to see why.

Tips – how to get more followers on Instagram

1. Don’t use the generic hashtags, as they are so popular that your photo will disappear off the feed within a few minutes. Use slightly less popular, but more niche-specifc tags. You’ll be more likely to reach the right crowd.
2. If you want to include a range of tags, don’t sprinkle them throughout your narrative as it makes everything a little harder to read. Instead, post a clean description of the photo, then add all the tags afterward. If you enter about 5 blank lines and then your tags, they will be hidden in the feed, and with a little […] link to expand it. Better still, in my view, add the tags as the first comment to the post. How many tags is too many? It’s commonly accepted to see a block of 20 to 30 hashtags (30 is the max), and if you keep them to the first comment (rather than the main description), even better.
3. Look for accounts where the number they follow is similar to the number of followers they have. This indicates they generally follow people back. Some of the bigger accounts might have tens of thousands of followers, but they only follow less than a hundred accounts themselves. They’re never going to follow you back.
4. Reposting other people’s content is generally considered acceptable on instagram if you credit the original poster. Some would say it’s more polite to ask first. It’s better to screenshot the images you want to repost, rather than use those repost apps which add their own watermark/logo.
5. Tag big feature pages in your posts, and look out for feature page hashtags to use. For example, if your #venusbikes photo is picked up and reposted by the @venusbikes account, you’ll reach around 70 thousand people!
6. You can’t post links on instagram. The only place you can have a link is in your bio, so don’t forget to fill that in with your website address, or wherever you want to send them. Put www.scarletfire.co.uk in there if you like ;-)
7. This one is completely obvious – post good images. Instagram is a very visual medium so be creative.
8. Post regularly.
9. Engage with people. Like their posts. Comment on them. Try to post descriptions that encourage people to comment on your own posts.
10. Engage some more. Because that’s what really makes the difference.

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Other related posts on ScarletFire:

How you can get your photos in your Strava feed

Jazz up your instagram photos with Prisma