Let’s take a look at Lauren’s data. While she had an overall increase in reach to non-followers, her post reach declined by (440), and her story reach declined by (10%). A viral reel is the explanation for her reach increase. There was no considerable boost in reach driven by the keyword list in post captions.

Let’s take a look at Kirst’s data. Kirst had a similar situation where 2 of her reels performed better than the previous month. However, her post reach was down, especially to non-followers.

Now, let’s take a look at Katie’s data. Katie’s reach dropped by almost 40%, and she notes, “I started using keywords in my strategy during July. And I noticed an increase overall in my impressions and reach for that month. I was changing things up, changing keywords, changing the format, etc., when we started our research in August, I was copying and “pasting the same set of keywords into every one of my posts with not as much variation.” This indicates that it is important to incorporate keywords that are content specific, not just use a copy and paste approach to a keyword strategy. Furthermore incorporating keywords in caption itself vs including them in list form at the bottom is potentially a more effective way to incorporate organic keywords.

With all of our reach down across the board, keyword lists do not cause an increase in reach to non-followers consistently. We used a base set of keywords and only added post-specific keywords to keep as many of the variables the same as possible. However, from Katie’s data, this shows a negative effect. The subsequent logical case study would be another month with keywords rotating or back to good old-fashioned hashtags.

A special thanks to Kirst and Katie! Make sure to follow them on Instagram for valuable social media management and strategy content.