Relationship between Hashtags Usage and Reach Rate in Instagram

Abstract

Social media users are growing constantly every year. Spontaneously interest in influencer marketing is also increasing. In influencer marketing, reach is important to estimate how many users have seen posts. Hashtags are the one of the most powerful way to increase reach. Specifically micro or nano influencers, whose followers are less than 10,000 followers, are in the spotlight for influencer marketing. Their follower numbers are low, but their reach per posts is high and marketing cost is low. In this study, we reveal the use of hashtags and the relationship between reach rate in nano influencer's posts. We collected 232 nano influencer (1,000-10,000 followers) accounts' meta-data and 113,247 hashtags used in their contents. By using regression analysis, we investigated the relationship between the number of hashtags and reach rate. Then by Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), we investigated the unique hashtags used in the reach rate quarter group. In conclusion, there was no relationship between the number of hashtags and reach rate. However, there were results that accounts using informative hashtags can be more effective to get reach than self-presenting hashtags. © 2022 IEEE.