Hashtags are one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase the reach of your social media posts. In fact, they have been proven to increase audience engagement and get you more likes. But many people believe that hashtags belong in the caption of the post, whereas many others believe they should go in the first comment. So, which is actually true? Where should you put your hashtags?
The Need-To-Know Study Info
SocialInsider and Quuu partnered up to complete a study to find out how your hashtags will actually bring the most engagement. To start off, they chose over 6,700 Instagram accounts of varying sizes to monitor. Then, from those accounts, they viewed the analytics of 649,895 posts. Their objective was to see where hashtags impacted posts the most, as well as learning whether or not placement really matters.
The Findings
At the conclusion of the study, it was found that in almost all tested cases, hashtags in the caption of the posts affected profile reach the most. However, surprisingly, there wasn’t a huge difference between the two, as seen in this chart.
There is definitely a clear difference in the effects of hashtag use versus the lack thereof. However, the placement doesn’t seem to be as much of a determining factor as one may have guessed.
What This Means For Your Personal Use Of Hashtags
Because there’s only a marginal difference between the impact of hashtags in the caption versus the first comment, it’s safe to leave that up to personal preference. However, as part of the study, they also found what you could consider the “sweet spot” of hashtags.
We’ve previously talked about how to use hashtags, so you could consider this as kind of an amendment to what we’ve said. It appears that based on this study, your posts should contain 6-8 tags. Any less will probably not generate as many results, but any more may come across as spammy.
Ultimately, the amount and placement of hashtags is up to you. Hopefully these practices will help you grow your account and increase your engagement! However, if you’d rather have a more personalized strategy for your business’s social media accounts, look no further. Contact us here at Blackwood Creative – we’d love to work with you and grow your brand.