When it comes to Instagram marketing, we all know that the clever use of hashtags is a definite winner in the case. However the only major confusion related to hashtags arrive when one gets stuck to placing them along with the caption of your post or in the first comment (of course it gives the neat look but presumably at the cost of outreach).
So, what is the actual truth behind the hashtags game? Does posting them in the first comment really affect the reach? To give you a better insight of how Instagram operates with the hashtags, a team from Social Insider has just partnered up with Quuu in order to conduct a study related to this matter which is based on 649,895 Instagram posts from 6,700 brand profiles.
The chosen brands ranged from large to small and medium sized businesses, so for a better overview the Social Insider team also separated results. Let’s begin with what they found!
The first point in the report turned out to be pretty much obvious as there was a vast majority of brands that still prefer to place their hashtages with the caption of their Instagram posts. In fact, it became difficult to give a comparison with the 10% minority that was writing the hashtags in the first comments. However, there was still an in-depth analysis shown by Social Insider team that showed comparative engagement in accordance with the reach of the post.
You can clearly see that posting hashtags in the caption clearly did better in reach on average, almost in every category. But that being said, there wasn’t a significant increase as well. Profiles that had 5k followers, the change in average reach per post was only 3.5%, whereas for brands in between 5k and 10k followers, only a variance of 1.23% was observed. Any further reduction meant less exposure.
The reports also found out that brands were using 7 to 25 hashtags per post, depending upon the content. This is a bit too much as compared to the previous research which showed that 9 to 11 hashtags gave optimal engagement while Quintly stated to use no hashtags at all as the best solution. But then it depends on your unique audience and Instagram gives you a space of 30 hashtags per post.
The data here nearly represents that putting your hashtags in the first comment isn’t worth the aesthetic benefit. For more insights, you can check out the full report here.
Read next: Instagram planning to syndicate IGTV videos with Facebook
So, what is the actual truth behind the hashtags game? Does posting them in the first comment really affect the reach? To give you a better insight of how Instagram operates with the hashtags, a team from Social Insider has just partnered up with Quuu in order to conduct a study related to this matter which is based on 649,895 Instagram posts from 6,700 brand profiles.
The chosen brands ranged from large to small and medium sized businesses, so for a better overview the Social Insider team also separated results. Let’s begin with what they found!
The first point in the report turned out to be pretty much obvious as there was a vast majority of brands that still prefer to place their hashtages with the caption of their Instagram posts. In fact, it became difficult to give a comparison with the 10% minority that was writing the hashtags in the first comments. However, there was still an in-depth analysis shown by Social Insider team that showed comparative engagement in accordance with the reach of the post.
You can clearly see that posting hashtags in the caption clearly did better in reach on average, almost in every category. But that being said, there wasn’t a significant increase as well. Profiles that had 5k followers, the change in average reach per post was only 3.5%, whereas for brands in between 5k and 10k followers, only a variance of 1.23% was observed. Any further reduction meant less exposure.
The reports also found out that brands were using 7 to 25 hashtags per post, depending upon the content. This is a bit too much as compared to the previous research which showed that 9 to 11 hashtags gave optimal engagement while Quintly stated to use no hashtags at all as the best solution. But then it depends on your unique audience and Instagram gives you a space of 30 hashtags per post.
The data here nearly represents that putting your hashtags in the first comment isn’t worth the aesthetic benefit. For more insights, you can check out the full report here.
Read next: Instagram planning to syndicate IGTV videos with Facebook
