In the course of the study, Socialinsider analyzed about 650 thousand posts in 6784 business accounts with different numbers of followers. The main task was to find out where it is better to place hashtags when publishing a post on Instagram: in the caption or in the first comment. It is believed that placing hashtags in the comments gives the post a neat, more elegant and complete look, while a large number of hashtags in the signature is associated with spam. But does it work?

So, 87% brands prefer to use hashtags in post captions

And the vast majority of posts on Instagram (93.8%) contains hashtags in the signature.

Profiles with up to 100K followers get more post reach and engagement when publishing hashtags in the signature. Regardless of the the number of followers. And for profiles with more than 100K followers, the difference almost disappears, and even the opposite is possible: posts with hashtags in the first comments received an increase in reach of 15.9% - for posts with hashtags in the signature, this figure is 14.8%.

Most brands use 7 hashtags or are already reaching to the maximum allowed 30. In the first comment, however, most often use no more than 2 hashtags in the first comment.

The results: how many hashtags and where is the best place to post when posting on Instagram - depending on the number of followers

For profiles with up to 5K followers, 6 hashtags are the most effective. hashtags in the signature. For profiles with 5K to 10K followers use 5 hashtags in the first comment:

For profiles with 10K to 50K followers, it is more effective to use only 2 hashtags in the signature, but it makes no sense to come up with more than 15:

For profiles with 50K to 100K followers, 8 hashtags in the signature won

But for profiles with 100K+ followers, it's better to post 6 hashtags in the first comment

None of the posts with the full 30 hashtags (or close to 30) performed well, regardless of the size of the profile. to 30) did not get the best results, regardless of the size of the profile.

Posts with hidden hashtags in the title are more effective

So hide them. Or publish them openly in the first comment to the post. To hide hashtags for a post, just leave some space between the post title and the hashtags so that they are displayed, only if the user clicks "more". Alternatively, put a series of vertical dots with a line break and copy the hashtags below them, downward.

And on average, accounts with less than 100K followers get a little more likes and comments when posting hashtags in the first comment