Following the recent statements in which Adam Mosseri, instagram manager, denied the real usefulness of hashtags when it comes to increasing views of the posts on this social network, . For this, the company dedicated to analytics in collected data from more than 75 million publications made between March 2021 and March 2022, calculating the average rate of impressions.
Hashtags do not affect the visibility of a post
After this, the debate has not been long in coming and the panorama of social networks has been involved in an intense conversation about the use of hashtags and their results. The explanation behind Mosseri’s words, in response to a user’s question, was that hashtags are used to organize content and make it visible to users, but this does not really affect your impressions.
“They help us understand what a post is about, which means it’s more likely to show up in a place like a hashtag page, for example, but in general, no, I wouldn’t try to think of hashtags as a way to get more distribution.”he explained. Subsequently, users such as the Instagram expert Allie Mason expanded on this concept, highlighting that the important thing when it comes to enhancing the visibility of a post on Instagram are aspects such as the interaction of users with the publication or the time they spend on it, aspects that are linked to the value provided by the post itself.
On Friday, the Head of Instagram announced that adding hashtags won’t get your content more views or increase its distribution. Here’s what it means for your strategy and your business:
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— allie | social media whisperer (she/her) (@thatalliemason) March 20, 2022
Updating and knowledge of the correct use of social networks to achieve their goals is one of the main concerns of brands. Therefore, questioning such an accepted fact as the need to include hashtags in publications to obtain better results is news that does not go unnoticed by anyone.
Hashtags are no longer used as a search element
In recent years there has been a migration of the space in which Instagram users perform their searches. Fewer and fewer people go to the hashtag search section to find posts that are related to their interests, instead of this use the main search section and enter the keyword or keywords.
However, this does not necessarily mean that these tags are no longer useful, they continue to fulfill their function, despite the fact that user navigation in the hashtags section itself is no longer as active. These help position the content and, if they are used strategically, they can be used to a certain extent.
Is the number of hashtags a determining factor for engagement?
As can be seen in the graph, the number of hashtags used in a publication does not significantly influence the engagement rate that it obtains. In fact, the study reveals that less is more, the highest rate of engagement per impression (3.41%) corresponds to the use of three-four hashtags, followed closely by the use of five-six. This corresponds to the advice recently given by Instagram, in which they mentioned that the ideal figure was between three and five hashtags per publication.
The number of hashtags according to followers
In the study they wanted to go a step further and contemplate more variants that can play an important role in the results obtained through the use of hashtags. Not by using a greater amount is greater diffusion obtained, but does a greater number of followers of the person who publishes influence them?
According to the data shown, There are no really significant differences in the number of impressions achieved in relation to the variables number of hashtags and number of followers.. The only notable trend is the one shown by the data corresponding to the most popular accounts, those with between 50,000 and 1,000,000 followers: the engagement rate decreases the more hashtags are used, more pronounced than in the less followed accounts.
As for the accounts with fewer followers, the best results were obtained using five to six hashtags. While in the case of accounts that are in a medium range (from 10,000 to 50,000 followers) they achieve better results in terms of impressions if they use more than five hashtags, although this trend suffers two setbacks in the intervals of thirteen -fourteen and seventeen-eighteen.
Hashtags are used to make brands appear in user searches
Hashtags are designed to help brands get discovered by users, not to increase impressions. The goal of using these tools should be to position yourself so that when the brand’s target audience performs relevant searches, the encounter occurs.
Thanks to this report, it was possible to conclude that, despite the fact that hashtags do not increase impressions, their use is important and they should be a topic to include in any content strategy on Instagram. Selecting hashtags carefully will be essential to ensure that users of this social network can find answers to their needs in brands.
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