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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Hashtags Are Dead | Here's How To 10X Your Followers Without Them - 886
00:25:59
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Hashtags are dead. And in fact, they've probably been dead for years. 2021 was actually the first time that I proclaimed that hashtags are dead. And since then, there have been more and more studies that have come out, features that have changed, and statements made by official Instagram staff that have supported that claim. Now, I think there's a pretty massive divide between the two groups of people who clicked on this episode. Half of you are like, yeah, Brock, I know hashtags are dead. They've been dead for years. So what do I do next? If that's you, go ahead and fast forward over the next few minutes. But if that's not you and you clicked on this episode thinking, hashtags aren't dead, how am I supposed to grow on Instagram without hashtags? Hashtags are a central way to grow, right, Brock, let me explain to you why I say they're dead. Number one, there are multiple studies that have shown that they are far less effective nowadays than they were just a few years ago, including a recent social pilot study that showed that the more hashtags you used, the less views you received. And also, according to that study, posts with zero hashtags performed the best. But of course, numbers can be deceptive. So what has Adam Mozeri, the head of Instagram, said he is on the record numerous times as saying hashtags are not a reliable way to increase your reach.
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No, adding hashtags does not meaningfully increase the chances that you get more reach or meaningfully affect your reach. Hashtags still exist. They do not meaningfully help your reach. People try to use them as a growth hack, but it's not particularly effective. They think it's a way to get a lot more reach, and it's not. It is not an effective way to grow reach at all.
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Hashtags are no longer a primary way to increase your reach on Instagram.
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They don't significantly increase your reach on Instagram.
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Gotcha.
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Contrary to popular belief, it's just not an important thing for reach.
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But of course, he's the head of Instagram, so he's likely going to be telling you things that are in Instagram's best interest, not necessarily always in your best interest. So let's look at what features have changed over the last few years. There are three key features that have been removed from Instagram that signal the declining importance or the declining effectiveness of hashtags. The first one is that Instagram has removed the ability to follow hashtags. You may not even know that this existed, but a few years ago, you were able to follow hashtags just like you followed any other person. And when you followed a hashtag, top posts from within that hashtag would show up in your feed. And that is the second major hashtag related feature that Instagram has gotten rid of. You no longer see posts from hashtags in your feed from following the hashtags. And number three, Instagram has removed the recents section below hashtags. And it used to be that whenever you searched a hashtag, there would be two different categories. One would be top, which had an algorithm to decide what were the top posts made using that hashtag. And then the recent section, which was just a reverse chronological order list of every single post that was ever made using that hashtag. And I believe that it is the removal of the recents category that has significantly impacted the reach and engagement provided by hashtags. Because a lot of people used to discover other people through the Recent section. And not to mention a lot of scammers and spammers used to go through the recent section and just like and or comment on and engage with every single post made recently using a hashtag. So without the guaranteed engagement from spammers and without the occasional discovery from someone just looking at the recents category, we can see quite plainly that hashtags are not going to be as effective nowadays as they were in the past. Now, the one big exception that I'm going to make to the entire episode today is if you need followers within a very specific geographic region. I'm not talking about followers within the US or followers who speak English, but like, if you need followers within a specific county or within a specific city, well, then hashtags might be effective for you because some people are still searching for hashtags within that city. For example, hashtag Fitness Coach is way too broad and it's unlikely that you are ever going to rank as a top post for that hashtag. You're very unlikely to ever get additional reach or engagement from using such a hashtag. But if you are a hashtag women's fitness coach in Kansas City, using that sort of a hashtag might allow you to find people within that geographic region. But what I just described is essentially the first way to grow on Instagram without hashtags. And that is what is replacing hashtags, which is SEO. SEO is nothing new. SEO has been around for 20 plus years and it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, SEO means using keywords and phrases in your posts that describe the post. And this is Something that I don't want you to stress out over because this is something that most of us do organically. In most of your posts, you are using words and phrases that people would be searching for in order to find your content. Anyways, the biggest tip that I can give you when it comes to search engine optimizing your content is don't overcomplicate things. Simplify your content. Make your content so simple and understandable that a drunk grandma could understand it. And if you do that, you will show up in more search results and it will be easier for the algorithm to place you in front of the right audience. And those two A's of algorithm and audience are the two things that we are search engine optimizing our posts for. Algorithmically speaking, we want our posts to include these keywords and phrases so that the algorithm can figure out what our post is about, what topics are covered in our post, and then once it knows that, it can show us to the audience that it thinks would be interested in those topics. Additionally, speaking of audience, when people are searching for different terms and topics when they're searching for a fitness coach in Kansas City, Missouri, you are more likely to come up in their search results in if you use words and phrases that relate to that or that are directly that in your post. Now, when I say using words and phrases that relate to your post, there's two places that I would recommend searching if you're just really stuck on, hey, I don't know what words people are using. I'm struggling to figure out if they would call something this or that. For example, I was working with one of our Insta Club up students who called herself a balloonist. But upon further investigation, what she actually did was corporate balloon art. She'd made like balloon archways and balloon entryways and balloon signs for corporate business events. And so we changed the language that she was using in her Instagram posts to call herself a corporate balloon artist rather than someone who was a balloonist. But the two tools that I recommend using to do a little bit of research and figure out what words people are actually using are, number one, good old Google Trends. Google Trends will show you exactly what people are googling and you can see a graph over time showing how different people have searched for different terms in Google. And you can even specify different geographic locations so you can find what words are people searching for in Florida versus California. And besides Google Trends, I also recommend the site answer the public answer. The public is a really great tool for typing in one to two keywords that generally describe your niche or the industry that you're in. And then it will give you all of the most common search queries that relate to that term or topic. And then once you have these keywords and phrases, where do you put them? I've been saying use it in the post, but where exactly should you use them in your post? Here are the four most important areas ranked in reverse order. The fourth most important place to include these SEO friendly keywords and phrases, according to Adam Mozeri himself, is within the comments section. Now of course you can't control what other people are commenting, but you can kind of steer the comments based off what questions you're asking in your post or any sort of open ended thing that you leave in the post that might encourage people to have a conversation. Additionally, if you leave a comment on your own post and you make that the new pinned comment, it is more likely to get more engagement, get more likes and for more people to see it. And thus the algorithm will weight that more heavily than other comments. The third most important place for SEO keywords and phrases is in the audio. Now of course you can't control the words in the song, but you can pick which song you are adding. And even more important than that, if you have any sort of voiceover spoken audio, maybe you're talking to the camera. Those things are the third most important in the algorithm's eyes for determining what your post is about and whom to show your post to. The second most important area is the post itself, basically anything that is on the screen. This includes words that you have written on the screen, whether that's text that you've added, labels, titles, hooks, closed captions, basically any text that you've added, or even any text in the image itself. One of my favorite examples of the algorithm messing up a little bit was that I once posted a carousel with real ideas. That's what the text on the screen said. I think it said 37 real ideas for July or something like that. And I was wearing a T shirt that said Rare Fish Investor. It's a meme T shirt don't worry about. But the Instagram algorithm read my T shirt and thought that my post was about rare Fish investing tips, which was quite a funny mistake, but it proved that the algorithm is able to read and scan every single part of your post, even down to the text on your T shirt. And then finally, in first place, the most important area to include SEO friendly words and phrases is in your caption. Now there is a disclaimer that I need to make here with the information that the caption is the most important area for SEO Words and phrases. What some people have begun doing is writing their normal caption, but then at the bottom of their caption, writing out a bunch of tags. Kind of like you would add tags to a YouTube video and they're separating them by commas or periods or whatever, the way a lot of people used to do it with hashtags. That is not recommended. And that is actually something that Instagram deems keyword stuffing. And they view that as a spammy behavior. So if at the bottom of your caption, you're just writing out a bunch of tags and keywords and phrases and hoping that that's going to help you, it's actually going to harm you. So don't do that. Instead, organically use those words and phrases in your actual caption. And a way that I like to do this is that in the first sentence of the caption, I like to restate what the video is about, summarize the tips or topic or story that is being shared in the video, or even just restate the same hook that I included at the beginning of the reel before I share. The second out of eight ways that you're going to get more views on Instagram without using hashtags. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast because every single week I put out a new episode on this channel with helpful tips, strategies and ideas to help you grow your business on Instagram. But back into our list of strategies, the second way that you're going to get more views on Instagram without hashtags is all or nothing editing. And when I say all or nothing editing, I want to show you this graph that I've come up with. It's kind of like a reverse bell curve, if you will. And on the Y axis on the left hand side of the graph, we have views, or how many views do these different kinds of posts receive? And on the bottom axis, the X axis, we have the amount of editing that went into the post. And because this is a reverse bell curve, it's kind of like a U shaped graph. On the far left end of the spectrum, we have minimal editing, next to no editing. These are what are going viral right now, being called yapping reels or facetime content. Content where you are just speaking directly to the camera. It feels unscripted and it feels very much like one friend talking to another. The trick of these yapping reels is that they oftentimes are very scripted. They're very thought out and they take dozens of takes. To be able to speak eloquently for 60 to 90 seconds consecutively without any sort of pauses, ums, ers, or ahs or filler words. It takes a lot of practice and it's much easier said than done. But when it's done well, it can be very engaging because it feels authentic. It feels so genuine and so real. And these kinds of reels require little to no editing. The time and energy that these reels take to create is the time and energy that it takes to do those 17 takes. And they perform very well because of it. On the far opposite end of the spectrum, the far right end of the X axis, we have reels that have a lot of editing. Think of people like OMG Adrian or RPN Roberto Nixon. These are people who spend hours creating their content. They have multiple professional cameras, lighting and years of experience. And so my recommendation for you is either go all in like these two people who I just named, and really make your ending cinematic and professional with sound effects and dynamic editing and visuals that are happening and your own custom graphics, or go to the opposite end of the spectrum and don't do any editing at all. Make it pure, real, authentic yapping. Imagine this. It's Tuesday around lunchtime, but it feels like Friday because you've already had to wear 17 different hats as an entrepreneur already this week, between shuttling the kids around, writing emails, coming up with reels, it's a never ending job. So you end up resorting to the same old boring snacks that you have every single day, or having the exact same meals on repeat. But you know you're craving something better with HelloFresh. 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You can do it all in Shopify. It makes your life easier and it makes your business operations run smoothly smoother. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling on Shopify today@shopify.com tribe. Again, that's shopify.com tribe the third way that you're going to get more views on Instagram without hashtags is to improve your hooks. Now of course, hooks are the basic Hooks are so necessary. Hooks are something that you've heard about a million times. There's something that I did an entire episode a few weeks ago about how to improve your hooks and come up with better ones. You can click on that link down in the description below, but the specific recommendation that I'm going to give you today is to use what's called a hook swap. A hook swap is when you take an already existing video with a viral hook. Now you have to be careful because not all of these are approved for reuse. Some creators don't want you or do not give approval to other creators to stitch or reuse their hooks. But there are some databases online, there are some collections. We have some in the insta clubhub of these Hook swap Videos that you can reuse and that have been approved. And essentially what you're doing here is you're not trying to reinvent the wheel. You're not even trying to remake the wheel. You're literally using the wheel off of an F1 car. I guess that might not be the best analogy because if you were using a tire that was already used by an F1 car, it's probably pretty shredded, but you get what I'm saying. These hook swap videos are very, very effective. And two of my favorite accounts that are using them very well are number one, wants and Needs brand, and number two, Citizen the artist. I will link them up in the show notes below. And if you want an entire library of these hook swap videos that you can use for yourself, just DM me on Instagram the word swap swap. My Instagram is Brock11Johnson. Make sure you follow me before you send me that dm. But when you do so, you'll get that entire library of hook swap videos for free. But the key with hook swap videos is what's called a match cut. And a match cut is a cinematography term that basically means that the ending of the first clip matches the beginning of the second clip in some way. Now, there's a variety of ways that you can do this. You can do it using the shape on the screen. So imagine there's a camera looking overhead at a coffee cup, and then it cuts seamlessly to a wheel spinning like a tire. And then it kind of maybe zooms out from the tire and you can see the whole car. But because the shape of the circle of the coffee cup and the shape of the circle of the wheel on the car are the same, that's what's called a match cut. You can also match action. So if I'm like swiping my hand to the right, I could start a new scene where I'm finishing the swipe of my hand to the right and I'm in a new location. Basically, this creates a seamless edit or a seamless cut, which if asked to, you could say, like, yeah, I see that there's a cut there. I see that we're in a new scene. I see that we're in a new location. But our brain takes a second and our subconscious doesn't necessarily recognize it as fast. And so it allows the viewer to kind of stay in the moment a little bit more. And thus it allows you to swap from these viral hooks into the rest of your reel or whatever it is that you want to post about the fourth way that you're going to get more views on Instagram is you're going to create share worthy content. Adam Mosseri is on the record of saying that the best way to get disconnected reach is to get more shares. Translation if you want more new people, more people who don't already follow you to view your reels, then you need to get more shares. Sharing is caring, and according to one study, one share on Instagram equates to over 250 additional views. To say it another way, a share is the best form of engagement. A share is stronger in the algorithm's eyes than a like a comment or a save. So in order to get more shares, I've come up with an acronym to help you remember what is shareworthy. Shareworthy content is s simple. I already talked to you about the drunk grandma rule. But essentially the simpler you can make your posts, the better. The easier it is to understand your vocab, the easier it is for people to just understand what your reel is about without any additional context, without having to read your caption, without having to know what you do for a living, the more likely your posts are to get shared and to reach more people. The H stands for hook, which we've already talked quite a bit about, hooks. If you want your posts to get shared, well then obviously first and foremost you have to hook in that audience and grab their attention. The A in the acronym stands for authentic or authenticity. And authenticity is one of these buzzwords that people love to throw around nowadays. And oftentimes you'll hear the advice that if you want to be authentic, to just be yourself. And while that is true, I don't think that's very helpful advice. So here is my practical way that you're going to make your posts more authentic. You're going to reduce the time between idea and execution. The less time that you can spend between. Hey, I have this post I want to make, I have this tip I want to share, I have this story I want to tell. And actually pressing post, the more authentic they will be. To say it the opposite way, the more time that you spend editing, refining, scripting, filming, refilming, chatgpting, the less authentic they will become. The R in the acronym stands for relatable, and relatability comes from specificity. What do I mean by that? Let's imagine that you have a meme, and it's a meme of the guy who represents anger in the movie Inside out, right? He's this little tiny ball of fire. If I posted that meme on my instagram and I said me, when my post flops, it might get a few shares and it might get a few laughs, but it's not super relatable because it's not super specific. It's a little bit specific. I'm at least labeling why I'm mad, but I haven't given any specifics for my anger. If instead I posted that photo of him and I added the caption me when I spend three hours editing a reel and it gets seven likes, that will get significantly more shares because it's significantly more relatable because it is specific. So if you want your content to be more share worthy, include more of those details. Don't just tell us how you're feeling. Show us. Illustrate what you're going through. Use specific details and focus on those specific nuanced numbers and experiences. The things that you think I'm the only person who's ever experienced this. I'm the only person who thinks this way. I know that you're a beautiful, unique butterfly. But chances are there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not maybe even billions of people who have experienced exactly what you are about to post about, who have experienced exactly what it is you're about to share. So by giving specifics, you allow the mirror neurons in their mind to fire, thus allowing them to relate to you more, thus increasing the likelihood that they share your post. And then finally, E E stands for entertainment, not education. Now, for years you've been told make your posts valuable, and that is true. But I believe a lot of people have misinterpreted value as education. And so my recommendation for you is to stop just giving out tips, recommendations and quick hacks and start focusing on entertainment first and foremost. Would this video be captivating to a stranger? Would it make sense even to a stranger? Can you include some sort of storytelling to improve your entertainment value? And one of the best ways to make your posts more entertaining is not necessarily dancing or being crazy or being wild. But number one, embracing what makes you unique. Use your own little words and phrases, be you, be authentic and commit to your reels. And also, whenever possible, include storytelling in your posts because stories are 22 times more memorable than facts. Tip number five is whenever possible, include a human face and a human voice in your content. According to a recent study, speech based videos so videos where you're talking to the camera or where there is a voiceover See a 5.6% higher engagement rate compared to ones with music only. And those same speech based videos saw a retention rate increase by 25%. So people watch the video for 25% longer if there was a human voice in it. Additionally, when there is a human face appearing in the first three seconds. So basically when there's someone on the screen in the hook, the overall retention of the reel increases by 10% as well, compared to reels where there was no human at the beginning. So while it's absolutely possible to grow an Instagram without ever showing your face, and faceless Instagram accounts can have success, it is more likely to be effective if you show your face and or voice at the beginning of your reels. Tip number six, for you to get more views without using hashtags is what I like to call commit to the bit. I'm sure that you've seen reels where people are doing street interviews or they filmed at the park, or they're filming their reel downtown. If you can get outside, your reel will get more engagement. In fact, we recently did a test at the Insta Club Hub where we filmed the exact same reels with the exact same scripts. And the only difference was that one was filmed inside and one was filmed outside. And the ones that were filmed outside consistently performed better. In fact, on average, they performed 34% better in terms of views and engagement. So whenever possible, commit to your reels. If you have a big idea, commit to it. If you need a prop, buy it. If you have an idea that you're going to go downtown and film, go downtown and film it. Yes, it's scary, but it's that scariness that people will appreciate and that people will engage with the reel because of. And so whenever possible, film your reel outside. Go downtown to the busy street. Do the thing that makes you feel cringe. Step out of your comfort zone, because that is where growth happens in life and on Instagram. Tip number seven, for you to get more views on Instagram is. And this is really simple, post more. Now, simple doesn't necessarily mean easy, but for years you've been hearing me say, the more you post, the more you grow. And I'm talking about to the fee stories don't count. The more you post to the feed, the more you grow. But according to a recent study by Buffer, the more you post over time, the more your engagement rate increases. Now, what most people experience is that in the short term, in the first one to two months after increasing their frequency of posting, they see a decrease in engagement and a decrease in views. And that's very scary. But if you can push through that initial 30 to 60 day hump, you will Find that the more you post, the more views you will get on each of those individual posts. And if you need help with posting more, that's an entire topic that we could spend an hour talking about. I've done episodes in the past to help you figure out how to post more, come up with more ideas, and post more with less time, energy and effort. So I'll link some of those up in the description below. And then, last but not least, the eighth and final tip to help you get more views, and this one is going to make you want to punch me in the face, is post better content. At the end of the day, Instagram wants to push out the content that is engaging. That is Instagram's business model. If they can push out content that people want to engage with, people spend more time on the platform, they're more engaged with the platform, and Instagram can charge more for their advertising on Instagram. And so at the end of the day, if your posts aren't getting the views that you feel like they deserve, they're probably just not that good. And I know that sucks to hear, and I know you're thinking, well, Brock, I recreate exactly what this person does and I do this and I do this and I check off these boxes, take a harsh look in the mirror, and I know this sucks to hear, but if you can improve the quality of your posts, you will reach more people. A tactical way that you can do this is find one thing that you can improve from one post to the next. Let's say you posted a reel today. What is one thing that you can focus on making more engaging for tomorrow? Maybe it's your caption, maybe it's your hook. Maybe it's the visuals on the screen at the beginning of your video. Maybe it's your audio quality, maybe it's how concise you're saying something. Maybe it's your on camera charisma and enthusiasm, whatever that may be. If you can improve one thing with each of your posts over the course of months and years, that will compound and eventually you'll be making such great posts that people will ask you, how did you do it? How did you grow? How did you get that many views? I know it's an oversimplification, but ultimately, if you want to grow on Instagram, post more, post better, or do both. Thank you so much for being here today and as always, happy networking. Sam.