Because, if you understand how it works – you can use it to your advantage – like say, growing your Instagram account. What we’re going to touch on in this article is how Instagram uses image recognition to reward you when you use the right hashtags that fit a specific niche. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
Current models are pretty labor-intensive – everything is manually labeled by human annotators in order to improve machine learning. Whilst this is accurate and works well, the process is starting to reach its capacity because of the sheer amount that needs to be processed.
How do I know if my hashtags are contextually relevant?
The best way to understand this is to really look at your account as a whole, and then zero in. What sort of content do you post? Let’s say it’s fashion-based. Now, look at each individual post. How can you accurately describe that post to someone who can’t physically see it? If you posted a picture of yourself in a red satin dress in Paris, you might talk about the location, the dress shape, the material, etc.
(You can also couple this up by optimizing your post’s ‘Alt Text’, but more on that later on in the article.)
Now think of those descriptors as potential hashtags: #redsatindress, #fashioninparis #alinedress.
These hashtags are all contextually relevant and specific to the photo you are posting. Another thing you want to consider is that the hashtags you pick are relevant to each other. So, instead of posting just #paris, we’ve used #fashioninparis, because it relates to the other two fashion-related hashtags.
Try looking at your next piece of content and thinking of descriptors. Once you have your descriptors or ‘potential hashtags’, you can plug them into Flick to find hashtags that are related to these, and slowly build up a list for your next post. Let’s go through an example of how we might do this:
Let’s say we are a fashion account, and this is our next post. We’ll start to think of some descriptors: ‘midi skirt’, ‘London style’, ‘minimalist outfit.’ Now, we can imagine these as hashtags ‘#midiskirt’, ‘#londonstyle’, ‘#minimalistoutfit.’ Next, we’d log in to Flick to see if these hashtags actually work for our account size and type.
You could then take a look at which hashtags suit your post the best, and copy them to your clipboard. If you’re not really sure how to pick the right ones, take a look at our strategy guide, which will walk you through exactly what you need to do, if you want to find the most suitable hashtags for your account. You can also expand hashtags from your initial search and find more, eventually picking your top 30 hashtags that are contextually relevant to your post – voila! We’re going to let you in on a little secret that will save time when it comes to your future posts. Once you’ve done your research and picked a set of hashtags you like, you can add them to a collection to save for later – so that you don’t have to do the research phase all over again. Create a series of hashtags collections on Flick, so that over time you can build up a library of effective groups, that can be applied to your future posts. For example, you might create a location-based fashion collection, a collection for when you specifically post pastel outfits, or a collection that would be great when describing a killer monochrome look. You may remember that we mentioned optimizing the Alt text section on your Instagram post earlier. This is another way to communicate to Instagram what the content of your image is. Using descriptors in your Alt text section will help you broaden your audience but also work like SEO would for a blog post or webpage. The Facebook Image Recognition tools favor the use of Alt Text. For example, if your photo featured a brown furry coat, you might put this descriptor in your Alt text section. To learn more about how Alt text can become your new best friend on Instagram, check out this recent blog post we wrote, where we go a little more in-depth on how to optimize the Alt text section of your Instagram posts.