Setting up the experiment

I’ve always been curious about hashtags on Instagram. There is so much speculation and so many things that have been written about which ones to use and the best practices when using them. I decided to run my own experiment and hopefully learn more about the impact of hashtags on Instagram. Keep reading for those all-important results.

On Instagram, I tend to use 25 hashtags which are mixed in with hashtags from posts with 1 million posts to 1000 posts. As running an experiment on the block of mixed hashtags isn’t really a viable option as I wouldn’t get valid data. I decided to run the experiment more logically and look specifically at a block of hashtags from posts from 1 million posts, 10,000 posts, 1000 posts and 100 posts.

Each day had their own 25 hashtags to look at, the results for this experiment were really interesting and I gained a lot of intel from it. As you can see below in the picture you will see which hashtags from posts I used.

A few things to keep in mind when running this experiment in order for it to be a fair race, I decided to post at 13:00 every day.

The all-important results

Monday

As you know from the picture above I used only 25 hashtags from 1 million posts. I have always heard in passing that you should never use many hashtags from 1 million posts. But the results were slightly unsurprising.

For each post that went out, I didn’t notice a huge rise in likes for each they stayed very close to each other. If you delve deeper into the analytics and look more specifically at the impressions from hashtags then you will notice quite the difference. The Monday post only got 6 impressions from hashtags which were very useful to see.

Tuesday

In this post, I used only 25 hashtags from 10,000 posts. The Tuesday post performed best in regards to the impressions from hashtags. I did get the most likes out of all the posts but by only a small amount.

Wednesday

In this post, I used only 25 hashtags from 1000 posts. This one performed rather well actually and came in second place for impressions from hashtags. I wasn’t actually quite sure what kind of results I would get for this one, but some interesting data came from it.

Thursday

In this post, I used only 25 hashtags from 100 posts. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting the results that I got from this one. For some reason my feeling was that this one was going to perform best, as there are fewer posts on them and I thought maybe there was a higher chance of our post showing up in peoples feeds.

Friday

In this post, I used only 25 hashtags from 1 million posts. I managed to run this number again and got very similar results to the one on Monday which wasn’t too surprising.

Key Takeaways

Now I have run the experiment and you have seen the results for yourselves I think there is a lot to learn from this experiment. More importantly that using hashtags from 1 million posts isn’t strongly advised.

What I do understand better is that you could use a mixture of hashtags from each of these number categories. You could use 2 hashtags from 1 million posts, 10 hashtags from 10,000 posts, 10 hashtags from 1000 posts and 3 hashtags from 100 posts.

As the results specifically showed a lower impression from hashtags for both the 1 million posts and 100 posts.

As with any advice given by most blog posts regarding hashtags, make sure you use hashtags that are related to the subject of the post.

Running this experiment was really interesting for me as I’m trying to learn the importance of social media analytics. In the new year, I will be performing more experiments on Instagram and hopefully a few more channels too. Follow me on my Twitter, to be told when and what experiments I may run.