The data from the Social media lab was taken from a total of around 300,000 posts between 2016 and 2017, which amounted to roughly 2 million likes in total. The experiment ran for a period of 6 months, with each hashtag being analysed for a month at the most.
HashTags That Get Instagram Likes
The best Instagram hashtags for likes
The top 5 Instagram hashtags to get likes are:
#love at 38,421 likes.
#instagood at 34,223 likes.
#me at 30,252 likes.
#selfiee at 27,052 likes.
At number five, perhaps the most well known, is the ever popular ‘selfie’. Selfie only narrowly missed the top spot with an impressive 27,052 likes. Another extremely popular hashtag that didn’t make the number one spot was #tbt, with 23,792 likes.
#instamood at 24,751 likes.
#fashion at 20,857 likes.
#friends at 19,311
To find out which hashtags received the most likes, I took 300000 posts that had used a variety of hashtags between September 2016-November 2017 and gathered the likes they got in total for all their hashtags used. From this data I created 6 bar graphs to show the hashtags which got between 1 and 10 million likes.
The large number of likes for these hashtags makes them very successful and brings in a large amount of engagement from people who see the posts. The fact that there are so many likes for these tags also shows that they have been used by multiple users over different periods of time, which suggests they will stay popular as more people start using them. Getting Instagram likes of this level can help users see their posts by more people, which helps them gain popularity on the social media platform.
Banned Instagram hashtags
The one tag which was banned and did not appear in the top 100 hashtags is #curvy. This is likely due to it being used on posts that aren’t exclusively ‘body positive’ and often feature pornographic images of women which do not abide by Instagram’s guidelines.
Instagram has a history of deleting accounts that use hashtags that violate their guidelines and in 2015, it seemed that they were specifically targeting accounts that included #curvy.
The one tag which was banned and did not appear in the top 100 hashtags is #curvy. This is likely due to it being used on posts that aren’t exclusively ‘body positive’ and often feature pornographic images.
I think hashtags are a way that people can express themselves and show their personal style through sharing, which is why the most popular ones have so many likes. By doing this experiment, I now know which hashtags will likely receive the most Instagram likes and can use this knowledge for my own Instagram account.
