Top posts of a hashtag are weirdly low performing

Instagram Marketing
#1

Hey. Just went through top posts of several hashtags, including super popular ones like #love, #food, and #dogsofinstagram, along with some sub 100k hashtags. Almost all posts were around 200-600 likes, posted by quite small accounts (sub 20k easily).

I used 4 different accounts to go through these, and while the results varied a little bit, the amount of likes (and size of accounts) was always small. Asked a couple friends do similar searches and even they had the same results.

Why aren’t big accounts and viral posts hitting those top posts sections? Does this mean that we can, and should, use these super saturated hashtags in our posts (against the common recommendations), since clearly the spot isn’t reserved to huge accounts.

Anyone else notice the same thing? Or is this common knowledge already?

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#2

Good question! I’ve heard this is because the hashtag page is personalized for you. Instagram is trying to guess whether or not you’ll engage with these posts. To do that, they probably take into account how many likes each post has.

But there are probably other factors that they think are more important. Like maybe they think you’re more likely to engage because you follow accounts whose followers also engaged with a post. Which is why the posts you see might be low performing.

I don’t know what these other factors are, but I’d like to know because it might inform our hashtag strategies.

I wonder if it would be possible to reverse engineer what factors they use, but it might be likely that it’s hard to scrape these factors.

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