Empower my brand
Empower my brand

Instagram Hashtag Analysis: An Essential Guide

We’ve talked quite extensively about the importance of Instagram hashtags in our previous blog posts. There’s no doubt that it has become a rage among marketers for all the right reasons.  Using trending hashtags for your posts makes them more discoverable. It’s estimated that about 83% of Instagram users discover new products and services on this platform. Perhaps you are already using hashtags for your posts. Are you using the right ones though? How are they boosting the performance of your posts? There’s a way to know – Instagram hashtag analysis. 

Instagram hashtag analysis

Why Should you Invest in Instagram Hashtag Analysis?

First, if you are investing your time and efforts into Instagram marketing, you’d want to see some results. Using hashtags is the best way to maximize your views and it’s nice to understand how well they are performing. 

Hashtags on Instagram work almost like a search engine. It’s a key feature of Instagram, one that helps marketers know which post is trending for which hashtag. This way, you stay on top of things and can attempt to gain new followers/audience by striving to make it to the top for the hashtags you’re using. Hashtags allow non-followers to view your content and then engage with you if they want to. This obviously makes Instagram hashtags important. And to work with hashtags and run a successful campaign, it is essential to keep a track of the metrics. Instagram hashtag analysis helps you with all this. How? Read on. 

Follower Count and Branded Hashtags

Social media platforms allow brands to foster and grow a large community for themselves. But how to know how big your audience actually is? Most brands rely on the number of followers they have as a measure of their audience size. Unfortunately, this metric is not entirely correct. 

You tend to rely on the follower count thinking that if a user has willingly followed you, they are interested in your brand.  However, some of these followers may not be truly interested. Some of them may have followed your brand a long time ago after they saw an ad. It is possible that over time they have lost interest or perhaps they don’t engage with your content as much anymore. Can you count them as your real followers? 

Instagram hashtag analysis can help you here. Branded hashtags tell you the real story. Branded hashtags are hashtags used exclusively in correlation to your brand’s mention. They don’t give you strict numbers but it will help you gauge the number of active audience members. The brand Coca Cola, for instance, has a follower base of 2.7 million. However, what is more, impressive is, the brand’s hashtag #ShareACoke has 659967 posts. This only means that Coca Cola has a massive fan base that is active and is willing to talk about and promote the brand. 

#ShareACoke

Design your Campaigns Better

If you’ve been looking for a way to connect your online and offline marketing efforts, branded hashtags are the way to go. Say you launch a campaign where the customer needs to click a photo at one of your stores and upload the picture using your branded hashtag. This helps you connect your offline and online presence and it does not stop at that. Tracking this branded hashtag will actually help you gauge the success of the campaign. 

Instagram Hashtag Analysis Guides your Content 

Invest in Instagram hashtag analysis and your content development team will keep thanking you. Content ideas are the most straightforward insight you could get from Instagram hashtags. The analysis tells you which hashtags receive the highest engagement. Build a list and start developing your campaigns and content around it. Follow the accounts with the top posts in each hashtag category, take inspiration and your post could be trending the next day. 

To wrap it all up, we suggest you try a social listening platform that offers an all-in-one solution for this. Instagram hashtag analysis is also a great way to discover influencers. You could practice all of this using a single platform. 

Instagram Analytics: What Metrics Matter

Social media is all about social engagement and engagement matters the most on Instagram. In fact, engagement on Instagram is said to be 4-12x more than that on other platforms. So now you have heard Instagram is a great platform for businesses and made a page for your brand. You have been active and also seeing some activity. You now want to know how well you are doing. Are you using the right Instagram analytics tool for that? 

Instagram Analytics

In this article, we try to help you understand which metrics are the most important to measure. 

Can Instagram Analytics Help you?

If you look for them, there are tools aplenty that can help you with Instagram Analytics. You can choose according to your specific need or go for a robust platform that can handle multiple platforms, manage a posting schedule and offer various other features. 

In this case, Instagram has its own in-built analytics to offer. If you have a business profile, you have access to Instagram’s app which gives you in-built analytics. This will assist you to know about your audience demographics, the times at which they are most active, their engagement rate (as in what they’re liking or commenting upon).

The data is collated by Instagram so it comes directly from the horse’s mouth. However, you can view the app-based data only if you have a business account. If you do not have a business profile, you can view it after you convert yours into one. However, the data cannot be viewed on a desktop or exported for further analysis.

How can Social Listening Tools Help?

Luckily you don’t have to depend fully on Instagram for the data you need. There are several Instagram analytics tools to help brands understand their audience and optimize their marketing decisions.

Auris

Auris is such a social listening tool that can be turned into a sound Instagram analytics tool. It lets you filter mentions from Instagram alone and run diagnostics. Auris’ platform makes measuring performance easy. It charts out the data and provides a dashboard with components to help you segment by sentiment, emotion, geography et cetera.

Social listening tools help your team visualize the data and be better able to find insights. Moreover, these tools allow you to access customizable reports. Besides Instagram, you can integrate dozens of other social media platforms and do a comparison all in one place. 

Important Metrics to Track

Now that you know how to get started with the tracking process, you might start wondering how to set things up? In simpler words, what metrics should I measure diligently and what matters? Here are some important metrics you can set up on your dashboard right away.

Engagement Rate

Mostly your dashboard will display an average engagement rate for your page/posts and indicate any dip or rise. However, if you wish to know in detail average engagement across all posts is given by [post interactions ÷ total impressions x 100]. 

Almost all social media listening tools measure this because experts believe the total number of impressions is a better metric than the total number of followers.

Top Hashtags / Trending Keywords

One of the best features of Instagram is that its search feature runs on hashtags. This makes it easier for you to organically attract attention. But since hashtags are popular on Instagram, everybody is using them. You have to zero in on the right ones for your posts in order to avoid the noise. Social listening tools help you find niche hashtags that work best for your brand. 

Influence Score

If your aim is to start a successful influencer marketing campaign you would need to track influencers on Instagram. If you are trying to find influencers for a niche market or on a tight budget, social listening tools can help. For instance, Auris assigns an influence score to individuals speaking about a specific keyword. This is based on their network size, engagement rate et cetera. So instead of getting muddled up with a thousand accounts and metrics, you have the precise data in your hands. 

Demographics

Do you wish to know more about the people who engage with your posts? Because if you do, you’ll be able to judge the kind of content they appreciate and hence develop a long term bond. Understanding audience demographics does not stop at knowing their age and location. You need to know the best times to post during the day, the overall sentiment and the topics your audience is most fond of. 

Trying to manage social media and online business in itself is an intense job. It gets more complex when you have different platforms for different purposes. Social media analytics is a remarkable way for you to start saving your energy and time. Start your social media marketing journey and let some of these smart tools help you through the process. 

How to Find Trending Hashtags on Instagram?

The use of hashtags has become the norm for quite some time now. In fact, It’s been there for over a decade. A hashtag was first used on August 24th, 2007 by @chrismessina. Almost every social media platform implements the use of hashtags. Instagram ranks on the top when it comes to the usage of hashtags. Hashtags on Instagram are a powerful tool for influencers and marketers alike. A brand can use this powerful tool in multiple ways. Before you start looking at trending Instagram hashtags, let’s look at how and why it’s so important. 

Hashtags on Instagram

Instagram Hashtags – Power Tools for Marketers?

A hashtag on Instagram works almost like a search engine. You would have noticed that hashtags on Facebook don’t mean as much as they do on Instagram. This is because Instagram uses them for sorting the data. The hashtags on Instagram determine the reach for your posts, and how visible your content is. Say you want to launch a software product for phone photography and editing. You want to know what content covering the topic already exists. Simply look for #Phonephotography on Instagram’s search engine. You’ll have all the posts with the hashtag #phonephotography marking them. On the flip side, it also becomes a tool for tagging your content to make it more visible. 

Find the Right Audience

Finding the right audience on Instagram also becomes easier. All thanks to Instagram hashtags and the platform’s intelligent algorithm. Trending hashtags related to your industry can help you find the people and influencers talking about it. You now have the opportunity to know more about the kind of audience you want to target. These accounts can also lead to additional information. For example, let’s say you are looking for the trending hashtag #ootd for your clothing brand. You might find popular accounts also tagging their content for #OutfitInspiration. In this way, you know your audience and also what hashtags they follow. Tag your content to these and increase your reach. 

Find Influencers and Promotional Content 

While you are discovering popular accounts via browsing trending hashtags, you may also find top and micro-influencers within your industry. You can visit their profiles to understand their engagement rates, follower base and take inspiration. Or even plan your event/product launch collab with them. Some companies get even more creative. They discover influencers, do a collab and come up with a special brand hashtag. The influencer then promotes the brand and the hashtag and they succeed in creating a unique space for themselves. Fiji Water did one such campaign. 

So How to Find Trending Hashtags on Instagram?

Instagram marketing has proven to be a successful tool for businesses. This can be attributed to the way brands have used and gained an idea of trending hashtags. Here we discuss some very easy ways you can find and track hashtags to your benefit. 

Organic Search

Like we mentioned earlier, hashtags are a way to aggregate content. So organic search is the cheapest and easiest way to find trending Instagram hashtags. So if you just type in a hashtag into Instagram’s search engine, it will display all the content available. Also, it begins to show other related trending hashtags. You could just tap on those and explore more. Initially, you may feel a little lost but give it some time. Even if you have no idea of any hashtag and are wondering what to type in, just type in your genre. Say you have a restaurant that serves Italian cuisine. Type in “#ItalianCuisine” or “#ItalianFood” and boom, you are there. 

Social Listening Tools

An organic search is a great option but for someone who can invest a lot of time on it. As a marketing manager, usually, you’ll have many other things to take care of. In such cases, you can opt for social listening tools and so. These tools do the job for you and track the top trending keywords and hashtags for you. Let’s talk about some of the tools:

All Hashtag 

In case you are searching for just the keywords to look for, allhashtag.com is the answer for you. It is a unique tool that can help you find the most trending hashtags and random hashtags too. The platform can also help you to create your own hashtag. 

AllHashtag.com

Auris

Looking for an in-depth analysis of the hashtags? Auris can help you track the trending hashtags and analyze the sentiment around them. It helps you gauge the kind of social following the hashtag or the keyword has. You’ll know what kind of audience follows it, posts related content et cetera. And finding influencers via this tool becomes easier thanks to the filters. The tool tracks the influencer scores of whoever posts regarding the topic helping you find your pick. 

auris helps find influencers
Instagram has been booming as a space for marketers, be it for Instagram hashtags or influencer marketing over Instagram. We have tried to study the platform and build our Auris platform around its nuances. You can check out our Instagram-related posts too, if interested.