How does one determine which hashtags drive engagement?

borntoglide · Nov 5, 2017

Any time hashtags are mentioned people always seem to be referring to hashtag analysis to determine which ones drive engagement for your account. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how one would go about this type of analysis in order to conclude with any degree of confidence that this is a great hashtag for their account.

Iconosquare, for instance, has a section where it shows average engagement for a given hashtag. Unless I am interpreting how they are coming up with this metric incorrectly, I am not sure this tells you the correct story though. If I used #yosemitenationalpark on one of my posts and it performed 10% better than the rest, this does not mean that this boost in performance came from using this hashtag, does it?

That picture could have been more appealing than other photos in my feed, it could have been posted at a different hour, or maybe on this particular day I spent all of my free time liking other people's photos, so some came to my account and liked my last photo.

Is this a matter of collecting data for long enough time to rule out these other variables or is there anything else that I am missing?

lukaGardel · Nov 7, 2017

You can search by hashtag and see how many likes certain posts get for those hashtags. I think Iconosquare just scrapes info based on hashtag to come up with data based on how many likes posts with those hashtags get.

borntoglide · Nov 8, 2017

You can search by hashtag and see how many likes certain posts get for those hashtags. I think Iconosquare just scrapes info based on hashtag to come up with data based on how many likes posts with those hashtags get.

hmm how does one know that those posts got likes because of the hashtag or for some other reason? I would assume that most people who are trying to grow their account are performing multiple actions a day: liking, commenting, following

So let's say I am an account with 15k followers. On Monday I uploaded a picture with 5 hashtags, liked 500 photos of targeted users, followed 300 people, and commented on 100 photos. The photo has gained 3k likes 500 of which did not come from my followers.

Since instagram does not provide insights into the source of each visit/like, in this scenario, you can't jump to a conclusion that this additional engagement came from any given hashtag, can you? Therefore, it would seem that in order to evaluate hashtag performance one would need to completely stop all of their growth activities and test one hashtag at a time, which would obviously take ages.

What am I missing here?

Margatsni · Nov 8, 2017

you can test 1 hashtag at a time without it taking ages

3 picture posts, each having their own tag.
repeat times 3

so you have 9 pictures with 3 hashtags divided between them

see which out of the 3 hashtags performed best overall

longgone · Nov 8, 2017

borntoglide said:
Any time hashtags are mentioned people always seem to be referring to hashtag analysis to determine which ones drive engagement for your account. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how one would go about this type of analysis in order to conclude with any degree of confidence that this is a great hashtag for their account.

Iconosquare, for instance, has a section where it shows average engagement for a given hashtag. Unless I am interpreting how they are coming up with this metric incorrectly, I am not sure this tells you the correct story though. If I used #yosemitenationalpark on one of my posts and it performed 10% better than the rest, this does not mean that this boost in performance came from using this hashtag, does it?

That picture could have been more appealing than other photos in my feed, it could have been posted at a different hour, or maybe on this particular day I spent all of my free time liking other people's photos, so some came to my account and liked my last photo.

Is this a matter of collecting data for long enough time to rule out these other variables or is there anything else that I am missing?

No, you are not missing anything. I think most people are used to using "BOT'S" for engagement, and or hashtags.. Try changing up your strategy, maybe look closer into the smaller accounts that are following you, then take it one more level down....

borntoglide · Nov 8, 2017

longgone said:
No, you are not missing anything. I think most people are used to using "BOT'S" for engagement, and or hashtags.. Try changing up your strategy, maybe look closer into the smaller accounts that are following you, then take it one more level down....

Thanks for replying! Could you perhaps elaborate a little on what I'll be looking for when taking a closer look into accounts that are following me? Which hashtags they are using for their own photos?

borntoglide · Nov 8, 2017

Margatsni said:
you can test 1 hashtag at a time without it taking ages

3 picture posts, each having their own tag.
repeat times 3

so you have 9 pictures with 3 hashtags divided between them

see which out of the 3 hashtags performed best overall

One day worth of data is not really a statistically sound sample but I guess it is what it is

Thank you for replying!

How does one determine which hashtags drive engagement?

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