Social Media Lab powered by Agorapulse
What's the magic number of hashtags to use on Instagram and Twitter?
Twitter hashtags..
We all use them, we all see them on Twitter.
But do they impact your Impressions or Engagement? Could too many hashtags in one tweet hurt you?
We decided to test this on a few Twitter profiles to see if we could find a difference between using 1-5 hashtags.
Hypothesis:
The Test
To get a good average for this test I used 3 Twitter profiles I run personally:
- @scottayres – my personal profile with XXX followers
- @smbuzz – a side profile I have for a podcast and website I used to have with XXX followers
- @patfromsml – my alter ego profile for our mad scientist with XXX followers
I dedicated 1 day of a 2-week period to a specific hashtag count on each profile – 5 hashtags on Monday, 4 on Tuesday, 3 on Wednesday and so on.
Here’s an example of the schedule:
In total, we’re analyzing the performance of 300 tweets. Each profile tweeted ten times per day with the specified number of hashtags for a total number of 100 tweets per profile over the 2-week period. Each tweet contained links relative to social media marketing, however different links were published on different profiles to match their niche. Here are the hashtags used:
#socialmediatips #marketing #business #socialmedia #branding
I used in this order as well. Meaning 1 hashtag was #socialmediatips, 2 hashtags was#socialmediatips and #marketing, etc. This was consistent across all 3 profiles.
The Data
To avoid boring you with the data from every profile I’ll simply share the combined and averaged data for all 3 accounts. You’re welcome. Data nerds, like me, can grab the full spreadsheet below.
Drawing a Conclusion
The data on this is quite interesting. I hypothesized Impressions would increase as the number of hashtags increased, but the data doesn’t fully support that. Impressions dipped at 2 and 3 then spiked at 4.
According to our data 4 hashtags got us the most Impressions – 17.22% more Impressions than 5 hashtag tweets and 40.53% higher than 2 hashtag tweets. That’s quite a big difference!
Without Impressions you’ve got no chance at engagement and clicks, so while I would advise mixing up your hashtag quantity and content from time to time, it’s worth posting 4 hashtags in a majority of your tweets for the highest impact.
**Watch the Social Media Lab LIVE show below for more insights:
