Social media is a useful digital marketing channel for therapists and other mental health professionals. It helps you build an online brand for your practice, share insights on your therapy specialty, and engage with your clients. 

If you have a social media presence but are struggling to grow your following and get engagement on your posts, we may have a simple solution for you to try—hashtags. Adding hashtags to your posts can increase your practice’s visibility by categorizing your content and making it easier for platform users to find.

Keep reading if you want to learn more about how to use hashtags in social media content. In this article, we explain how to find and implement hashtags, looking specifically at the mental health field.

Why Use Mental Health Hashtags in Therapy Social Media Content?

By labeling your social media posts with hashtags, you improve brand awareness and encourage post engagement. Here is more information on the benefits of incorporating hashtags into your social media strategy:

• Increases visibility: Once you categorize a post with hashtags, the platform’s algorithm can determine which users to show it to based on their interests. Users can also find your post on their own by searching for a specific hashtag. This increases your reach to users outside of your followers list.
• Improves engagement: Using hashtags allows you to tap into trending topics in the mental health space. Joining these meaningful conversations creates a sense of community and fosters connection with your target audience.
• Fights stigma/raises awareness: By using hashtags related to popular mental health topics, you help create a safe space to have an open dialogue about mental illness. This reduces the shame around getting therapy, encouraging people to seek help if they need it.

Formatting Hashtags

Before you can start using hashtags, you must understand how they work. Here are a few basics on hashtag formatting:

• Start with # symbol, or pound sign. Anything after that will become searchable and clickable.
• Don’t use punctuation, symbols, or other special characters because that breaks the hashtag.
• Spaces also break the hashtag. If you want to make it clearer where words begin and end, capitalize the first letter of each word. For example, you could say #MentalHealthAwareness instead of #mentalhealthawareness.

How To Find the Right Mental Health Hashtags

What hashtags should you use in your social media posts? Below, we go over how to select hashtags. We look at some popular ones about the mental health space in general, and we explain how to research niche ones that are more specific to your therapy specialty or your post’s topic.

General Mental Health Hashtags

Generic mental health hashtags tend to be more popular, meaning more posts use them and more users search for them. Including these hashtags in your content increases the likelihood of your practice being seen. 

Here are 15 of the best mental health hashtags to use to enhance your posts:

• #mentalhealth
• #meantalhealthawareness
• #mentalhealthmatters
• #mentalhealthsupport
• #mentalillness
• #mentalwellness
• #emotionalhealth
• #emotionalwellbeing
• #selfcare
• #anxiety
• #depression
• #counseling
• #therapy
• #therapist
• #psychology

Niche Mental Health Hashtags

Maybe you want to use hashtags that relate to the topic of your post. Here are some ways to research and find more niche hashtags:

• Searches: Type the topic of your post into the search bar of the social media platform to get a list of related hashtags. You will be able to see how many posts use each hashtag to determine how popular it is.
• Other accounts: Maybe you follow other mental health professionals. You can see what hashtags they include in their social media posts and determine if they work for your content.
• Hashtag generators: There are several free websites, such as all-hashtag.com and best-hashtags.com, that aggregate popular hashtags from social media platforms. You type a keyword into one of these websites, and it generates a list of related trending hashtags.

Best Practices for Implementing a Hashtag Strategy

Now that you have a list of potential hashtags for your social media content, you may be wondering how to use them. Here are our recommendations on how to add hashtags to posts to maximize their reach.

Don’t Use Too Many Hashtags

Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have limits on the number of hashtags you can include per post—three, 15, and five hashtags, respectively. Other platforms, including Facebook, Twitter or X, and LinkedIn, don’t have limits. Regardless of which platform you’re posting on, though, we recommend sticking to three to five hashtags. Using more than that can make it confusing for the algorithm and users to determine what your post is about.

Combine Niche and Popular Hashtags

Use a mix of general and specific hashtags to get the best of both worlds. General hashtags are more popular, so they increase your post’s visibility. On the other hand, niche hashtags categorize your posts better and ensure that you reach users who are most likely to be interested in your content.

Create Branded Hashtags

You don’t have to only use hashtags that already exist. In fact, we would recommend creating a new hashtag with your practice’s name. You can include this hashtag in each of your posts to build an online brand for your practice that grows over time the more you post.

Put Hashtags at the Bottom

Your list of hashtags should go at the end of your post after the rest of your copy. This keeps your content clean and easy to read. Another option is to keep hashtags out of the post altogether and instead include them in the first comment.

Final Thoughts

Hashtags enhance your social media content, making your therapy practice easier for potential clients to find. If you are looking to improve your social media presence, TherapySites can help. Contact us today to learn more about our Social Media Management service, which uses hashtags and other best practices to grow your reach across multiple platforms.

Katie McNichols is an experienced writer and editor, specializing in digital content. The aim of her blog posts is to demystify digital marketing for healthcare professionals. She hopes to equip them with the tools they need to build an online presence that promotes their services and grows their practice.