An in-depth report by 
Table of contents
Introduction
This study analyzes the performance of Instagram profiles between January 1st and June 30th, 2019. The performance of over 34,100 profiles and more than 5.9 million posts were observed in this analysis.
The Instagram study provides detailed insights into the use of the platform. In particular, it focuses its analysis on six different topics:
- Follower development on Instagram
- Usage of post types: Image, video or carousel
- Instagram post length analysis
- How hashtags were used
- Hashtag usage analysis
- Weekday and weekend comparison
To give you a better overview of our findings, and also to make it easier for you to apply the findings to your own strategy, we clustered all the analyzed profiles in six differently-sized groups:
Instagram profiles grew up to 16% more followers
Having a huge amount of followers on Instagram gives you direct information about the popularity of an Instagram channel. To give you a clearer understanding of the development of our profile groups, we decided to analyze the follower growth for our six profile groups.
With a growth of 16% for profiles with 100k-1m followers and 15.9% for profiles with 10k-100k followers those two profile groups were the most successful in growing their audience.
The smallest analyzed group (0-1k followers) also has the lowest growth rate (9.4%). A reason for this result could be that it is harder than ever to naturally grow the following of an account nowadays. Especially for smaller profiles that don’t have the same kind of visibility as their bigger competitors throughout the app.
68.2% of Instagram posts are single images
Instagram users have the agony of choice by having to pick from three different post types: images, videos and carousels. Every post type has its own unique way of telling a story and engages with their audience in a different way.
So what was the most used post type of the analyzed profiles?
Images are still the post format primarily used on Instagram, representing 68% of all published posts. They are followed – at a distant second – by video posts with a share of 18%. Carousel posts bring up the rear with just 14%.
Larger profiles are publishing more videos
Now it’s time to see how the different Instagram post types have been used by our profile groups. As we’ve already seen, images are the most used post type overall. But is it possible to detect a difference in posts types used among the profile groups? Do smaller profiles post more images than larger ones? Let’s find out.
What is interesting to see is that larger profiles posted more videos. Even more so, the bigger a profile is in terms of followers, the more videos it posted. So, whereas the biggest profiles had a share of 30%, the smallest profile group had a share of just 10%.
An explanation for this may be that large profiles – who are mainly influencers, celebrities or big brands – already have videos at hand or have the budget to produce video content for their social channels. This could be commercials, music videos, brand videos or other types of branded content. This kind of content is easily reusable and often produced for just this purpose, publishing it on as many channels as possible.
Video posts receive up to 49% higher interactions
Now let’s take a look at which post type creates the highest interactions for Instagram users Note: Interactions are defined as the sum of likes + comments.
Splitting up the three formats, we immediately see that video posts receive way more interactions than carousel or image posts. We compared each post type with each other and got the following results:
67% of all posts are longer than 150 characters
In the next part of our study, we take a look at the length of Instagram posts. We clustered the post length into five different buckets for this.
Is there a link between profile size and post length? And what could be the explanations for it?
300+ characters have been used in 35.8% of the analyzed posts and 30.8% of all captions contained 150-300 characters. Just 0.6% used no description at all and only 6.6% used 1-50 characters. In short, there’s a visible trend to publishing more descriptive posts.
This might be the case because brands and influencers use Instagram as one of their main communication channels nowadays, and announce product launches and partnerships within the app. Influencers also often treat Instagram like their diary, letting their followers become part of their lives. Instead of writing blog posts, many influencers now use Instagram instead for that purpose.
Posts with 1-50 characters tend to receive more interactions
Is it even necessary for influencers and celebrities, like Beyoncé or Cristiano Ronaldo, to write a post description at all in order to receive a lot of interactions? Do micro- or nano-influencers or small brands need to write more to get their followers’ attention?
The answer to these two questions is yes and no. By looking at the average interactions profiles with over 1m followers have received, it’s noticeable that posts without captions tended to get more interactions.
All other profile groups had something in common, namely that posts with a length of 1-50 characters seem to work best for them. The smallest group (0-1k) followers received almost the same number of interactions for posts with a length of 1-50 and 300+ characters.
We then split up the different profile groups and analyzed their interactions in correlation with the post length to give you more detailed insights for two selected groups.
1m - 10m followers
This group received the highest number of interactions on average on posts that didn’t have a caption at all. We also see that the longer the caption was, the less engagement they received.
1k - 10k followers
The best way to find out which post length works best for you is by testing and analyzing different post lengths. This is the most accurate way to discover what benefits your account and what your followers react to.
Are you interested in getting more detailed information on the results for another specific profile size? Just write us an email - we are always happy to help!
More than 50% of all posts don’t include emojis
Emojis are the heart of social media communication. You don’t only find them in chats with your friends; they’re also used by businesses and influencers. But do they actually lead to more interactions or are they just a nice visual effect?
Analyzing the usage of emojis, we found out that 52.3% of all posts didn’t include emojis at all.
Posts that include 1-3 emojis represent the second-biggest share with 38.2%. Only 8.7% of all analyzed posts contained 4-10 emojis, and in just 0.9% of the posts more than 10 emojis were used.
That said, more than 90% of all analyzed posts either contain no emojis at all or just 1-3 emojis.
No emojis can mean lower interactions
We learned that the majority of posts include either 0 or 1-3 emojis. But is low emoji usage the right choice? Could more interactions be achieved by including more emojis in a post? Spoiler alert: emojis can have a positive effect on your posts as they often go along with more interactions.
The analysis shows that regardless of whether an Instagram account is small or big, posts that don’t include any emojis receive the lowest interactions.
Splitting up two selected profile groups and analyzing their interactions in correlation with the number of emojis we got the following results:
0 - 1k followers
For this group, using 10 or more emojis in posts, attracts the most interactions. Using no emojis results in the least amount of interactions. The higher the number of emojis used, the higher the amount of interactions.
10k - 100k followers
In this group, posts that included 4-10 emojis received the highest interactions on average. Posts that included 1-3 or more than 10 emojis are not far behind, though, with a fair share of interactions observed.
Including emojis in your posts should generally benefit you, based on the data. Play around with a different amount of emojis in your posts, observe and analyze what works well for your account. If you’d like to get detailed results for other profile groups, just let us know by sending us an email.
1-3 hashtags most used in posts
The next part of our study examines the usage of hashtags. How many hashtags were used overall in posts and how many of them can lead to more interactions? We grouped the number of hashtags into four different buckets for this, and found the following results:
35.2% of all posts contained 1-3 hashtags, which is also the biggest share in this particular analysis. 28.7% of the posts didn’t include any hashtags and 4-10 hashtags were used in 23.1% of the posts. 10 and more hashtags were found in 12.9% of all analyzed posts.
The profile group with the smallest amount of followers (0-1k followers) is the one that used the highest number of hashtags in their posts. 30% of all posts in this group contained 4-10 hashtags.
In comparison, posts in the biggest profile group (10m+ followers) contained much fewer hashtags: 37% of all posts were published without hashtags and 47% of the posts included 1-3 hashtags.
Fewer hashtags, more interactions
Here are some further findings which can help you to identify the right number of hashtags for your profile size. This overview will be of benefit to you, if you want to try out something new in your Instagram strategy.
Interestingly, larger profiles used 1-3 hashtags most often in their posts but tended to get even more interactions when they didn’t use them at all. We then split up the different profile groups again, dug a little deeper into the data and analyzed their interactions in correlation with the amount of hashtags used.
10m+ followers
This group received the highest engagement on posts without hashtags. Interactions on posts using 1-3 and 4-10 hashtags are almost similar. They received the lowest engagement on posts that included more than 10 emojis - which actually make up just 2% of their posts.
0 - 1k followers
Profiles with the lowest number of followers were able to generate the highest number of interactions when using more than 10 hashtags in their posts. There is not a huge difference in the amount of interactions between using no hashtags, 1-3 or 4-10 hashtags.
As it is harder for smaller profiles to be seen or to grow on Instagram, using a lot of hashtags can be definitely helpful for this group – they can be found more easily by other users.
Tip: Do your research and try to choose highly relevant hashtags, nothing too generic.
Again, a good way to find out how many hashtags work best for you is by testing and analyzing using different numbers of hashtags in your posts. Let us know if you’d like more detailed information on another profile group – we’re always happy to help.
Higher interactions on weekends
When are you spending the most time on Instagram? Is it possible that you’re more active and engaging on weekends than on weekdays? Let’s take a step back and see when posts were actually published: looking at the average posts per day, there’s a downwards trend to the number of posts on weekends.
Despite the fact that more posts were published on weekdays, interactions on Saturdays and Sundays are higher by 27.3% in comparison to the amount of interactions weekday posts receive.
That's all for now! We hope you enjoyed the findings. Questions? Don't hesitate to reach out!
