Instagram is one of the most popular social networks among young crowd today. We are all making efforts to become as popular as possible on this photo-sharing virtual platform, and hashtags is a great way to make sure our post reaches as many people as possible. THat said, we often wonder how many hashtags to include in our post, and where to put them in order to get the best reach. Recently, a study was conducted in this regard. A team from sociel media firm Socialinsider recently teamed up with Quuu to conduct a study of some 650k Instagram posts, originating from 6,784 individual brand profiles. The brand profiles chosen ranged from large brands to SMBs, so the Socialinsider team separated their results to provide a better overview based on audience following.
The research showed that the vast majority of handles prefer to place their hashtags within the caption of their Instagram posts. The research showed that placing hashtags within the caption did result in better reach, on average, for the analyzed posts, in almost every category. Though that said, the increases, for the most part, were not significant - for profiles with less than 5k followers, the variation in average reach per post was only 3.5%, while for those with between 5k and 10k followers, the variance was only 1.23%. But still, any reduction means less exposure. The data here would suggest that putting your hashtags in the first comment is likely not worth the aesthetic benefit.
A lot of this will depend on your unique audience, and of course, the specific hashtags you use, but according to this data, most big handles are going with seven, or a lot of tags.
