Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s big boss, sows doubt 😶 Do hashtags still serve a purpose?
In a recently released video, the social network’s CEO claims that hashtags were not designed to increase your reach, but rather to help the algorithm categorise all the content created on the platform. Is this true?
The first answer that comes to mind: Yes, BUT if the algorithm puts my content in the right category, it will help to make it more visible and therefore increase my reach, won’t it? 💡 DJM has done its homework!
Are hashtags taking a back seat?
As you’ve noticed and everyone’s talking about, Instagram is making some big changes to its platform. In particular, the new keyword search feature transforms the social network into a search destination. This means that it is no longer limited to hashtags.
What you probably didn’t know:
In order for this search engine to suggest relevant publications, Instagram’s artificial intelligence takes into account:
- Your text,
- The lexical field used in your captions (did you know that only 35% of people read captions?),
- The photo and video content and,
- The hashtags.
So the hashtag is no longer king of the SEO game on Instagram 👑 and it’s a study by Social Insider that shows a drop in performance linked to it. In fact, Instagram is recording less navigation on the page named “hashtags” and the data linked to the latter is falling.
Hashtags = #outdated?
To answer this question that everyone is asking 🔥 , let’s go back to the Social Insider, study, which was tasked with understanding the relationship between hashtags and views. To do this, the researchers analysed more than 75 million Instagram publications posted between the year 2021 and 2022. And here are the results:
NO significant difference between a post with 1, 3 or even 20 hashtags, regardless of the number of followers on the accounts analysed!
Moral of the story 👇
Yes, your hashtags are still interesting because they are part of your wordings!
The point is to use them for the function they perform: to inform the algorithm of the content you publish so that it is correctly categorised.
Remember: hashtags are powerless on their own. But if they’re accompanied by a well thought-out caption (in conjunction with your creative team), they’ll become relevant to your core target audience.
A final tip: Are you or do you have a brand that has an active presence on Instagram? Don’t forget to create branded hashtags. They’re a powerful way of collecting UGC and creating a space dedicated to your brand for 100% authentic content 🏆
Social media expert, Marie is part of our e-marketing team. Creative and always looking for the latest trends, she shares with you her knowledge and mastery of Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pinterest and other social media algorithms!
