The Scenario
You're the head of organic social at a mid-size e-commerce brand. Your team maintains a master hashtag library in an Excel workbook — 200 hashtags across product categories, lifestyle themes, and brand campaigns — that feeds into every content brief.
Three days ago, a post using a hashtag from the library got significantly lower reach than expected. You looked into it and found the hashtag was on Instagram's banned list. No one on the team had checked. The hashtag had been in the workbook for over a year.
Your CMO wants the entire library audited and cleaned before the Q3 campaign briefs go out. That's in four business days.
The bad version:
- Open Instagram on your phone, search each hashtag, check for the "Posts hidden" banner, note the result in the workbook. Two hundred hashtags. At 45 seconds per hashtag, that's an hour and a half of thumb-scrolling.
- Spot-check the 30 hashtags that appear most frequently in recent briefs and assume the rest are fine.
- Outsource the audit to a freelancer, wait for a quote, wait for availability, miss the four-day window.
The CMO's deadline is real. The frequency doesn't care about your bandwidth.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the hashtag library in column A and, through its built-in RiteKit integration, calls the banned-hashtag check for each one and writes the status back to column B.
Audit all 200 hashtags in my Excel "Hashtag Master" worksheet using RiteKit's banned-hashtag check — write the ban status in column B and highlight banned rows in red.
What You Get
- Column B: BANNED or SAFE for every hashtag in column A
- Any row marked BANNED is highlighted in red for visibility
- All 200 checks run in one operation — no manual Instagram searches
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The hashtags in column A have inconsistent formatting — some have the # prefix, some don't, some have trailing spaces
Before calling RiteKit, clean column A: strip any leading # and any trailing whitespace from each cell, write the normalized value back to column A. Then run the RiteKit banned-hashtag check for each normalized hashtag and write BANNED or SAFE to column B.
The library is organized across three worksheets — "Product", "Lifestyle", "Brand" — and I need all three audited
For each hashtag in column A of the "Product" worksheet, call RiteKit's banned-hashtag check and write BANNED or SAFE to column B. Repeat for the "Lifestyle" and "Brand" worksheets. Then create a new worksheet called "Banned Hashtags" listing every BANNED hashtag from all three sheets with the source worksheet name in column B — this is the removal list.
Some hashtags appear on multiple worksheets — I don't want to call RiteKit twice for the same tag
Collect all unique hashtags from column A across the "Product", "Lifestyle", and "Brand" worksheets. Call RiteKit's banned-hashtag check once per unique hashtag. Write the result back to column B on every worksheet where that hashtag appears. For hashtags that appear on more than one worksheet, add "MULTI-SHEET" in column C on every occurrence so the team knows the removal applies across briefs.
I want to audit the library, remove banned hashtags, and produce a clean version ready for the Q3 briefs in one pass
For each hashtag in column A of the "Hashtag Master" worksheet, call RiteKit's banned-hashtag check and write BANNED or SAFE to column B. After all checks are complete, create a new worksheet called "Q3 Clean Library" containing only rows where column B is SAFE. Format the clean library with hashtags in column A only, no header row, ready to paste into a campaign brief document.
Audit, filter, and deliver the clean library in one operation.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your hashtag library Excel workbook, then ask it to run a full RiteKit banned-hashtag audit across every row in column A before the next campaign cycle. You might also want to generate fresh hashtag suggestions for upcoming posts, or return to the RiteKit + Excel overview.