

Does Adding Many Tags to an Instagram Photo Maximize the Number of Likes? - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2014/03/hashtag-tag/

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gus_massa
_Correlation does not imply causation._

Alternative theory (without any data :)):

Perhaps most of the photos with 30 tags are dew to semiautomatic fill-all-the-
keywords strategies in SEO attempts. So most of them have naturally more
exposure than photo from individuals that only use a few tags (like “dog” and
“sleeping”).

Then they get more likes because they have more traffic, not because they have
more tags

Proposed experiment:

* Pick 70 new photos, and separate them in 7 groups of 10 photos at random.

* Post them with 0; 5; 10; ... ; 30 tags and wait ...

* Count the likes for each group

* Kill outliers? 10 is too small? Find someone with more knowledge of statistics to check the experiment.

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sutterbomb
But where did they get more traffic from to begin with? You're implying they
got traffic from "fill-all-the-keywords strategies", which is more-or-less
what the analysis is advocating. That may not be true, but your alternative
hypothesis isn't actually an alternative. At least not as I understand it.

That said, I do think controlling for follower counts would be informative. It
would help tell you if there's actually something else at play (e.g. once you
control for follower count, there's no more correlation). I suspect it could
also tell you the # of hashtags is even more important than currently shown
because it also helps build your base of followers, by reaching more new
visitors.

E.g. If increased hashtags increase my number of favorites, they also increase
my number of followers by some percentage. Then each successive post has a
larger direct reach of followers, in addition to the new visitor reach from
hashtag discovery. A single hashtag could actually have a compounding value.

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NoPiece
My alternative theory might explain it: Bad actors who stuff their photos with
30 keywords also use shill accounts to like them.

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timeuser
That was a lot of analysis that seems pretty useless to me. What action would
you take based on that information? I know that my photos get more likes if I
use hashtags. If I don't hashtag a photo I only get likes from my existing
followers. If I do put on hashtags I get some likes from people that don't
follow me. I'm sure they are searching for photos by hashtag. I myself find
photos and people to follow based on hashtag searches. The bulk of likes I
receive are always from my followers and hashtags make no difference to them.
But hashtags bring new followers.

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Yen
(This post assumes that one is trying to maximize likes. There are obviously
different, and arguably superior, ways of using a social network)

The value of analysis like this is proving, codifying, and quantifying things
that are intuitively believed to be true. Or, alternatively, disproving those
things.

One might believe that "more hashtags" causes "more likes", and even have a
model in which "more hashtags" causes "more likes", but that doesn't mean that
it's actually true.

Before doing the analysis, the result could have come out either way. The
author could have found that "more hashtags" did not cause (or at least, was
not correlated with) "more likes". In this case, one could have taken the
action of not filling in 30 hashtags, saving effort.

And, for that matter, there's a lot of variance in average likes that's not
accounted for by hashtag count. Further analysis might actually prove that
some other factor (such as age of poster) influences both like count and
hashtag count, and accounting for that other factor, hashtags might actually
be useless or detrimental.

\-----

As a general philosophy, intuitively knowing "something is true" is not nearly
as good as being able to point at data, and show general evidence that the
thing is actually likely to be true.

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atroyn
Interesting approach. I wonder what the result would look like if time were
taken into account - photos that are around longer will have a higher
probability of more likes by default. It would be easy to correct for this by
only considering photos that have been posted for the same length of time.

What is the distribution of likes over time on Instagram anyway?

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minimaxir
Time is definitely a factor. Most of the Likes are made within 24 hours, but
then they taper off. I'll look more into that for a future blog post.

(Out of curiosity, I did rerun all the charts in the post with the most-recent
photos removed. The resulting charts were relatively unchanged.)

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deedubaya
Brace yourselves, even more hashtags are coming.

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codinghabit
Am I the only one who wishes the time and effort spent into making this post
was used towards something more important/meaningful?

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minimaxir
It's actually not that time consuming to make the charts once you've got the
templating down. :)

