Instagram is updating its search features to allow users to find content via keywords for the first time. As of November 18, Instagram Keyword Search is in fact available in English-speaking countries (U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand).
Will this new feature really succeed in changing the way users use social? How should posts be optimized from now on to make the most of it? Let’s look at some hypotheses together.
The year 2020 was a year of revolutions for “Insta.” Earlier in the year, the launch of the “Instagram Guides” feature, which allowed creators to share tips, resources, and other longer-form content in a dedicated tab on their user profiles. Then, the interface change and the focus on Reels, with which it sought to compete directly with TikTok. November, on the other hand, was the month of keyword research.
As marketers, we can say that most of us had some hope for it.
Keyword research already plays a very important role in other social. On Twitter and Pinterest, for example, it is a key component among the platform’s features because it encourages the discovery of posts that are of quality but would otherwise receive little attention.
Until now, search options on Instagram have been limited to hashtags, location tags and usernames. This obviously left a flood of potentially interesting content “in the shadows.”
The introduction of keyword search changes the rules of the game a bit: there are new ways in which posts and accounts can be found and, as a result, new possible strategies for growing an Instagram profile. We expect that this will give more visibility to profiles that produce valuable content, rather than solely those of well-known influencers or people already famous outside of social.
What do we know about Instagram keyword research?
There is still much to understand about Instagram’s new search feature, but let’s dwell on the information that has been made available so far.
Keyword search will allow users to type in phrases such as “healthy recipes,” rather than just a hashtag such as #healthyrecipes. In this case, all thematic posts about healthy eating, even if not specifically labeled as such, should then surface among the search results.
It is unclear how Instagram determines the meaning of a post without relying on hashtags. It is known that mostly captions will be used to identify relevant results, but even in this regard there are still many questions. For example, to what extent is Instagram’s algorithm able to understand synonyms and equivalent phrases? A company spokesperson announced to The Verge that the search algorithm considers “a number of factors” and leverages a machine learning system that will allow it to find the highest quality and most relevant content for each user making the query.
Since this is a feature in the implementation phase, keyword searches are still “limited to topics of general interest and queries that fall within Instagram’s community guidelines.” This means that not all topics, especially niche topics, will be searchable in this way. You cannot search for words like “vaccines,” “Trump,” or “Biden,” while you can search for “puppies,” “pasta,” or “flowers.”
New SEO possibilities for Instagram?
For me, of course, the most exciting aspect of this update is its potential impact on so-called “SEO” for Instagram: a new algorithm to understand and exploit starting almost completely from scratch.
For the first time we can actually talk about ranking factors. These would seem to include content type, captions, what was published in previous posts, and more. We also know that for more than two years Instagram has been making use of artificial intelligence to perform semantic analysis of images and recognize what they represent.
Have you ever tried to check the code of your Instagram photos from your desktop? Okay, that’s probably definitely nerdy. 😅 Yet I find it very interesting to understand how Instagram uses artificial intelligence to recognize the content of the images we post and generate a description based on the recognition of the objects within them.
Optimizing the alt text of Instagram photos
At the end of 2018, Instagram introduced alt text (the ALT text). To date, this is one of the social’s features with the greatest potential and, at the same time, one of the most underrated and least used.
The first reason why one should not forget about alt text is to make one’s content accessible to more people within the community. For example, blind people will be able to understand the content of the photo thanks to the screen reader function of their phones.
The introduction of keyword search makes alternative text optimization even more important, so that Instagram’s algorithm understands what we are posting and thus increases the chances that our content is shown in search results.
It is useful to remember that at any time you can change the alt text of your photos:
In addition to this step, it is also important not to neglect the quality and clarity of the photographs we share. The content posted should be sharp and of high quality so that Instagram’s algorithm can identify what the image represents.
To understand whether the content we are publishing is “readable” for the algorithm, one option is to not change the alt text when uploading, and then check the description that Instagram can process on its own. Optimization of this attribute can then be taken care of.
Optimize caption copy
With this new update, copy will gain more importance than ever for a business’ visibility on Instagram, and the image may no longer be the main focus. Those who create a new post will need to pay close attention to the text with which they will present images and videos, and perhaps some typically SEO logic will need to begin to be incorporated.
Presumably, the management tools we already know will begin to develop dedicated keyword search functionality specifically for Instagram. It is possible to speculate that in the future this functionality will become monetizable, and ads will begin to appear within Instagram search as well. We shall see!
In the meantime, when it is fully implemented, it might be worth experimenting a bit by combining copy and hashtags to focus on the best growth strategy for each profile.
3 potential benefits of Instagram keyword research
Get to know customers better and engage them
Instagram’s keyword search tool could help companies identify mentions of their brand that they had missed in the past because the user had not used tags or hashtags. This could be a great way to find new potential customers to interact with and build relationships.
Market research and competitive analysis
Through the identification of keywords used on Instagram, we will be able to search for competitors’ target keywords and see how the audience is talking about them. It will be easier to notice if customers recurrently mention certain pain points, so that you can solve them with your own product or service.
This will also help you learn more about your audience and their interests, and figure out what keywords to use to get found.
Getting your ideal customer to find you with the right content
All of this will help create better social content that resonates better with one’s audience, thus strengthening one’s social media presence.
However, the revolution seems likely to be fairly gradual: not only because of the territorial/linguistic limitations of the upgrade, but also because the new feature is still limited to a few select searches. Moreover, so far there has been little discussion about this upgrade, as it has not been rolled out to all users and many have not noticed it.
Therefore, this is the best time to study how this development may actually affect user behavior. In fact, we still do not really know what the response will be to this new way of searching for content on Instagram.
It would be a promising sign to see an increase in people’s engagement on posts in the coming months: it would mean that keyword search is actually helping to discover content that otherwise would not be found.
