Hashtags, whether you love them or hate their spammy nature, give influencers a powerful boost in engagement.
Research suggests that using 11 or more hashtags in an Instagram post can generate 442% more engagement than using none. Naturally, established and up-and-coming influencers alike have caught on.
But before you start a hashtagging frenzy, there are a few elements to understand if you want results.
Avoid Hashtag Overload with a Platform-Specific Strategy
Hashtags on Instagram are different and more complex than other social platforms. Twitter’s 140 character count limits the number of hashtags one can use, but Instagram users are allowed to use up to 30 hashtags per post. This flexibility has opened the floodgates for experimentation, hashtag overload, and best practices to emerge.
If your influencer strategy relies on Instagram, it’s essential you understand how influencers are leveraging hashtags to impact engagement, and how you can break down what’s trending into valuable business insights.
Uncovering Hidden Hashtags
Influencers have found a loophole and are skipping the spammy look of hashtags by hiding them in the first comment rather than adding them to the caption of the post. This methodology helps influencers to reap all the benefits of hashtags (trending on topics, popular page exposure, search optimization, etc) and also maintain a clean-looking caption. Influencers find that sweet spot between mega popular hashtags and relevant niche hashtags to trend in pertinent places.
This step-by-step guide to how influencers make hashtags disappear goes deeper into the topic. But more importantly, what impact do hashtags have on us, as marketers? What information do these hashtags provide to our social strategy?
Why Hashtags Matter to Your Influencer Marketing Game-Plan
Being able to track which hashtags influencers are using gives you valuable information that can better inform your influencer marketing strategy. Hashtags can help you better understand the conversation themes that influencers are trying to be a part of. This knowledge gives you clues into what influencers care about, which is critical to engaging with them.
Hashtags also give you a peek inside of the influencer’s strategy, surfacing what they think is currently trending in your space. By looking beyond the caption, you can get even more context for that specific post. The more you know about an influencer’s content, the better your chances to get on their radar.
Hashtags can also give you useful competitive data. By searching for brand or campaign-specific hashtags within influencers posts it becomes easy to see which influencers are working with your competition. If you are working with the same influencers, this could impact how you partner with them in the future or inform you of new influencers you potentially should be working with.
Traackr’s platform allows users to track all hashtags influencers use on Instagram (even the ones hidden in the first comment) to ensure you never miss an engagement moment. To better understand how the Traackr platform can support your Instagram measurement efforts, check out 3 Ways to Measure Influencer Marketing on Instagram.