Delving into Hashtags with Rapha | Ep. #5

On the fifth episode of Candid Creative, Antonio speaks with friend Rapha about the power of hashtags. Rapha’s big interest is in hashtags and hashtag research. He has been primarily focused on the relationship between hashtags, data, and growth. From branding and marketing to traffic and SEO, Rapha knows the insides and outs of how to make hashtags work for you.

He broke through on Instagram as a “hashtag hacker” for sharing all of his secrets about SEO optimization and analyzing hashtag data. Starting with keywords, Rapha focused on the size of hashtags. Then he moved to people focusing on real estate posters and found that they do not behave the same way that content creators do. One example of this is that mortgage and real estate don’t comment on their posts, when the wineries would. A mentor told them that “normal people” don’t use the platform in the same way that workers do. This was a breakthrough.

Rapha and Antonio briefly dive into how the Instagram algorithm affects the exposure of posts, whether from humans or bots. What’s important for people to remember is that hashtags are only a tool: they cannot see the future. This has caused Rapha to greatly reduce the amount of time he’s spent analyzing hashtags. Rapha realizes that there are other metrics of far greater significance. Like, for example, are you creating good content? Do you understand your audience? Do you understand your why? Do you know the value of your content? These things are going to drive more success than trying to “hack” the hashtags. In many cases, even the developers don’t really know how the algorithms work.

Finally, Antonio and Rapha discuss some of the pitfalls of hashtags. The big one is this: less is more. If you have too many, they just get buried. The best thing to do is to move away from relying on hashtags and the algorithm and focus more on doing things to increase your own engagement. Spend time on the platform liking, sharing, commenting, posting good content—this is going to drive engagement more.
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