Week 8 Part A: Business Instagram Hashtags

         For this research into businesses that utilize Instagram in order to promote their business, I wanted to start at my top favorite podcast: Crimejunkie. This podcast is a true crime show that covers solved murders, disappearances, unsolved murder, and conspiracies. Crimejunkie is one of the most downloaded podcasts on Spotify with over a billion downloads and millions of listeners weekly. Their Instagram page has posts about cases that have been covered, and it leaves room for listeners to get more involved with questions and helpful tips. They have 1.1 million followers and over 800 posts. Crimejunkie posts 1-4 times a week with questions for listeners, photos of victims, promotional photos, and merchandise. The posts' likes range anywhere from 4,000 to 45,000 with comments ranging from 36 to 2,000. The posts that get the most comments are on true crime memes that they post, and promotional photos of the lead voice's upcoming book. After that, though, the comments are mostly on the unsolved cases and photos of victims. The page doesn't utilize hashtags very often, but I did find that the posts that use hashtags seem to get the most likes. The hashtags are normally at the end of the post and typically only include one hashtag. The hashtags are mostly on the book promos and there was a post with the hashtag "internationalpodcastday", but this one didn't get as much involvement. The most used hashtag is "#allgoodpeoplehere" which is the name of the upcoming book. I think overall that the Crimejunkie Instagram does decently for the business, but if they utilized more hashtags on their post I believe that there would be a lot more involvement. 

        The next podcast I chose is a comedy podcast that started back in 2016 but has more recently started to become popular. The podcast, This Past Weekend, has an Instagram account with 216,000 followers. The account is almost exclusively snippets from episodes of the show. The Instagram page puts out one post a week with the posts' likes range from 800 to 30,000, and the comments go from 50 to 270. The posts that get the most likes and comments are of the videos of the host, Theo, talking by himself because he's more funny and random than anyone he brings on the show. The Instagram account utilizes hashtags on every single post at the end of the caption. All of the captions are short and sweet. Most of them say what episode number the video is from and who Theo is speaking with. The hashtags stay pretty consistent with the podcast name and the speaker, so most posts have the hashtags "#theovon" and "#thispastweekend". Other hashtags will be the name of the guest he has on and a hashtag of what they were talking about. Honestly, I think that the like to follow ratio for This Past Weekend is better than Crimejunkie's because they have a fifth of the following but have a similar amount of engagement on the Instagram. For example, This Past Weekend's last post was a day ago and it has 8,000 likes whereas Crimjunkie posted 3 days ago and got 4,000 likes. The podcast is doing pretty well for itself, and I can see the account growing a lot more in the near future. 

        The I'm Sorry podcast is one that I've never heard of before and had to Google to find. Spotify only shows the most listened to podcasts, so I had to dig. This podcast takes a comedic spin on public apologies that are rarely genuine and rather a cover for public relations. On Instagram they have 2,000 followers and 120 posts. They have not yet posted for the month of October, but the Instagram does have 4 posts from September. Most of the posts are photos of the hosts amongst a combination of the celebrities that are being discussed. When looking at their posts I actually can't see how many likes their posts get because some Instagram accounts don't display the number of likes, so the posts say "liked by _ and others". The comments on this page range from 0 to 20. The account does utilize hashtags, but they're at the end of a long caption. The most consistent hashtag is "#makelifesuckless" which I don't really understand since it isn't part of the podcast name. The rest of the hashtags are about the celebrities that the posts are about. I think the I'm Sorry podcast should add a little bit of diversity in their posts because most of them look the same and are really busy at the same time. It's hard to focus on one aspect of the post because of the 8 celebrities that are on the post, the long captions, and the colors that don't flow together. They should also utilize the name of their podcast in the hashtags to help get more brand recognition. 

        The last podcast is called Why Won't You Date Me. The show's speaker, Nicole, talks about struggles in her dating life and shares stories about terrible dates and relationships. She brings on guest speakers as well. I couldn't find an Insatgram account for the actual podcast, but I did find Nicole's Instagram account where she promotes the podcast. It also appears that she's a stand-up comedian. The Instagram page has videos of her stand-up routines, photos of herself from promo events, and screenshots of guest stars on her podcast. She has 763,000 followers and gets anywhere from 2,000 likes to 70,000. The amount of comments on the posts range from 18 to 2,000. The posts with the most likes are from Nicole's stand-up routines and the least likes are on the promos for the podcast.  scrolled through a lot of the posts on this Instagram and I din't see a single hashtag. I really think Nicole should either start utilizing hashtags to help bring attention to her posts about the podcast, or she should start another Instagram account that is dedicated to the podcast..or both. It gets confusing when business and personal are mixed, and I think it would do Nicole a lot of good to create another platform that she can dedicate to this podcast. If she posted a similar amount of content as Crimejunkie along with the idea of the podcast highlights and hashtags of This Past Weekend, Nicole could have a great platform to promote her podcast. 

        Looking at all of the Instagram accounts of podcasts gave me an idea of the type of content that brings the most success and involvement on the platform. My Instagram account will definitely use hashtags because I didn't think they did anything until I looked through these Instagram accounts. Another aspect is the type of content to be posted. I really liked This Past Weekend's Instagram account because everything was straight to the point with the videos from the show and the short captions. 

        Hashtag ideas: #playground #playgroundpodcast #podcast #comedy #musicpodcast #comedypodcast