The other night playing aroung with a test account I posted a simple photo and included some over saturated hashtags, nothing special, what I was testing? a tool to change the fonts and icons for the captions, to make them look different and pop out more.
Next morning I was shocked with the amount of likes the post received, so I started to check and…most of the reach came from hashtags, I was curious and I did a deep dive to understand how was it possible…
Well… here is the discovery Instagram app or browser doesn’t have any mechanism to convert the formatted text to plain text so… I give you an example:
#photography is not equal to #ᴘʜᴏᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴘʜʏ so my posted ranked in the formatted/styled hashtag.
I was not the only one using that format but much less people that the plain text.
Note: The search box in the app and browser clean the text so you cannot find the formatted hashtag searching, you just need to click on it from a post or comment.
Or:
this is the formatted hashtag coded %E1%B4%98%CA%9C%E1%B4%8F%E1%B4%9B%E1%B4%8F%C9%A2%CA%80%E1%B4%80%E1%B4%98%CA%9C%CA%8F if we decode it we get ᴘʜᴏᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴘʜʏ
What are you thoughts?? , I see lot of different uses of this, lot of potential here.
Better if you test it in your own accounts, the insights of my test account won’t tell you much.
To make use of this and gain something you will need to do some hashtag research as well.
580.7M posts ( 14.8k /h) ~ 307 ( 192 low) ~ 13
vs. 8.6k posts ( 1.5 /h) ~ 300 ( 108 low) ~ 24
Much much higher chances to reach the top. That can look nice for visitors of my profile if they click on the formated hashtag and see my post in top.
-Was nice to see the #ᴘʜᴏᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴘʜʏ with less than 10k images. That’s how it must have been in the very beginning…
-When I looked at the #ᴘʜᴏᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴘʜʏ’s content It looks like the formatted font hashtags is used mainly in India.
Another idea is using popular niche hashtags that are still empty in the version with format, fill/dominate them with your content and leave the #link in your bio. For example as a shoe seller make the formated hashtag #𝗿𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗲𝘀
So essentially the change of font didn’t really have anything to do with it, but rather you used a hashtag that had very little competition (8k posts, 1.5posts/hour) instead of using a super popular one (580m posts, 15k posts/hour), is that right?
Could you share how many likes from hashtags you would usually expect to get using that hashtag (#photography) on average versus when you used the much smaller #ᴘʜᴏᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴘʜʏ? And did you use many more hashtags or not? How are you sure this is the hashtag that brought in the traffic?
depends how the hashtags are collated. #bmw vs. #BMW are way different in results becuase most of the time hashtags are very case specific,. Lowercase most and often only used.
Interesting post, but I wonder the value of doing so under this question asked.
Its nice to rank for a specialized hashtag, but what’s it worth if you can’t search it?
I make the safe assumption that no person in their right mind would go out of their way to search a format-specialized tag unless incentivized to do so.
So I do also wonder where those likes are coming from & if it bears any weight into considering the value of that reach.
Nonetheless, worth exploring to see other avenues to exposure.
I would’ve hoped that somehow the formatted hashtag would “glitch” into the standard version of the tag. THAT would be something.
The benefit that we found was that the posts using those formatted hashtags got better traction and perfomed better due to the algo not because the people searched the hashtag.
The posts were pushed to the explore page for similar hashtags, so IG categorized as the unformatted text version.
And there is where we are still researching, in some places is considered a different one in others no.
Instagram app or browser doesn’t have any mechanism to convert the formatted text to plain text so… I give you an example:
so my posted ranked in the formatted/styled hashtag.