Hi all,
I am back with the next set of insights that we collected while analyzing Instagram posts.
Today I am going to share how the “Number of Hashtags” and “Media Type” affect the engagement percentage of posts on Instagram in general.
Is there the best number of hashtags for a better engagement percentage?
From the left chart, the answer seems to be no. A single golden number of hashtags that will generate higher engagement doesn’t seem to exist. Though there are visible peaks at n=9 and n=26, there isn’t much variation in the plot as a whole. This seemed counterintuitive to us as it signals that no matter how many hashtags are used, there wouldn’t be much change in the engagement percentage. We think that it is possible that rather than the number of hashtags, what hashtags(volume/relevancy) are used may have a higher impact on reach/engagement. I’d appreciate it if any experienced Instagram marketer can provide an explanation for such an observation!
What is the best type of post (Carousel/Image/Video) for maximum engagement?
The chart on the right suggests that “Carousel Album” garners the maximum engagement on Instagram posts. The engagement percentage of Carousel albums is ~2x that of Image or Video type of posts. One possible explanation for such a trend can be that carousel albums are a sweet spot between images and videos in terms of “amount of information conveyed” and “time to gather information”.
What could be a possible explanation that posting image posts results in a slightly better engagement than posting video posts? I always think video posts are more interesting, but I do notice that video posts usually have fewer likes than image posts.
Great study, and thanks for sharing it with the community, but I can see it being kind of biased because low-quality accounts are creating image posts most of the time resulting in a low number of likes, and carrousel posts on the other hand are more likely to be carefully crafted high-quality posts and naturally, they receive more engagement.
Long story short - just create high-quality content.
I love these insights! Honestly, hashtags still cause me headaches - I just wish they weren’t even a thing
My favourite takeaway from your hashtag research? 0 hashtags = almost as good as peak hashtag engagement.
I find my videos are much more likely to go ‘viral’ but have a lower engagement rate by reach, although they have a much higher reach overall and therefore better engagement vs follower numbers.
Almost always the case. Why? Likely related to human behavior. Clicking the like button is not intuitive for video content (notice how YouTubers always signal people to like the video, it’s not an immediate reaction to video content, unless you’re on Facebook).
On a separate matter, I think I saw this posted earlier on another forum as well (not reddit). Regardless, I think it’s valuable to see.
I’m currently running tests on accounts to verify the hashtag findings for myself. From what I see early on, it seems this is the case. I’ll see as the accounts grow how this develops.
The Carousel findings didn’t surprise me. And that’s a good analysis of why this is so. I’d say something similar, along with how the platform distributes & shows carousel content versus any others.
Account size and past explore page reaches play a big role in the effectiveness of hashtags. Afaik the explore page does not rely on hashtags, because that would be too risky.
Instagram gave a pretty good insight when they explained how the explore page is “build”.
That makes sense. I was thinking maybe the reason why video posts get fewer likes is because of the fact that we can’t see the number of likes on them. I realize now that most of the time I just play the video and save it if it’s interesting instead of hitting the like button.
