Experiment: Does custom Instagram alt text increase reach?

Social SEO is a hot topic at the moment; Alt text on Instagram may be trending even more than ChatGPT. And while there is a ton of content explaining theoretical best practices, there aren’t many blogs that show anyone actually testing it.

Here at Hootsuite, we pride ourselves on putting into practice what the influencers preach, showing rather than telling, and plunging our dainty digital hands into the theoretical mud. We are social media scientists! We test theories when we see them!

And today we have an experiment for you. Join us to see if creating custom alt text on Instagram can increase your reach.

Hypothesis: Creating your own alt text on Instagram will make my posts more accessible

Let’s get one thing clear: Instagram alt text is a must for all marketers. Accessibility is important, and inclusive design makes your content accessible to the visually impaired.

But what if alt text could also improve your social SEO?

For first-timers here, alt text is additional descriptive copy used to describe the content of an image in HTML code. This makes your content accessible to people using screen readers and can increase your chances of appearing in search results.

Instagram offers AI-generated alt text, but you can also write your own.

We want to know if Instagram’s custom alt text could be the new weapon in your arsenal to combat the wasteland that is Instagram SEO. Or just raise the numbers in your analytics a bit.

Today’s hypothesis is that custom alt text will bring us more reach than using Instagram’s auto-generated alt text.

Let’s see which text wins!

Methodology

To test the alt text theory, I opened the Hootsuite toolbox and scheduled six different posts.

Three have original, custom alt text, and three have Instagram-generated alt text.

I have tried to keep the content as similar as possible to avoid bias. For this experiment, I decided to post book reviews because it’s my love language and Instagram has a strong #bookstagram community.

I also let Hootsuite choose the best time to post (within a few days) to encourage participation.

Now my personal Instagram account has a whopping 801 followers so I was expecting some juicy results.

I published the first post (in the book Tenderness is Flesh) with the default alt text on Instagram. Then over the next week, I alternated custom alt text messages with default alt text messages.

The schedule was as follows:

Each book was reviewed with the same caption length (no spoilers, of course) and I used the same hashtags (#bookstagram and #goodreads).

Default alt text…

The default alt text for the first photo is simply “Photo by Colleen Christison, February 22, 2023. Maybe it’s a picture of a book.”The rest of the default alternative text is written in the same way.

… vs custom alt text

I wrote a much more detailed, keyword-rich image description for the custom alt text.

For example, for Young Mungo I wrote: “The image shows a book lying flat on a peach felt background. Douglas Stewart’s Young Mungo.

“You can only see the cover of the book, but not the pages that have the title ‘Young Mungo’ at the top of the book in large white type. At the bottom of the book, in the same white type, but slightly smaller, it says: “Douglas Stewart.”Then, under that, in even smaller print, it says: “Booker Prize winner, author of Shaggy Bane.”

“The picture on the cover of the book is a white teenager with his mouth and nose underwater. He has fine features and full lips. You can’t see the boy’s eyes, only the lower half of his face and right shoulder. It is illuminated by the sun shining through the water. The sun refracts through the surface of the water, creating patterns of light on the boy’s face and shoulder.”

I then washed and repeated this strategy for other posts.

Results

There are results! As you can see, there were two runaway stars of the show: “I’m glad my mom died”and “Sex cult nun.”(Two of the most piquant band names.)

Here are the results of the coverage of this experiment in Instagram’s own analytics.

Bonus: I also increased my total followers by a whopping 1.7%.

What do the results mean?

So we got our numbers. But what do they really mean?

TL; The DR of this is that the numbers don’t tell us (without a shadow of a doubt) whether the custom alt text works better than the default alt text.

The experiment failed…

Unfortunately, the results were fairly similar, with one standout element of content: a review of Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Is Dead. This may be due to several factors. This may be due to the fact that the book was trending last year (due to its shocking title) or more to the “right time, right place”situation.

The second-place post, Sex Cult Nun, also has a shocking title and was published at the same time as the first-place post, on Monday at 11:00. Hm.

The post in first place had a default alt text, and the post in second place had its own alt text.

To further test the success theories, I could look at other books that were trending in 2022, books with shock titles, or try to post them again on Mondays at 11am and see how my content is performing. I would keep alternating the custom alt text with the default alt text until I saw patterns appear.

It took more A/B testing to figure out why those two posts were in the top spot.

…but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write your own alt text

The benefits of alt text go far beyond Instagram reach and engagement rates. Alt text allows visually impaired people to view your content, creating a more equal social media experience.

In addition, including people from this demographic in your content strategy opens up your potential access to a wider audience. Be inclusive on social media; this is great.

Hashtags are still relevant

The results show that users are still finding content to interact with hashtags. Continue in the same spirit!

There are a few disclaimers we need to make

There are several factors we need to keep in mind when considering these results.

First, my last Instagram post was last September. The more active your account, the more likely it is that people will interact with your content. And the more likely it is that Instagram will share your content in their discover feed. So, in the beginning it was a difficult battle that could affect the results.

Pss: don’t be like me. Plan your posts ahead of time with Hootsuite and stay relevant, engaged, and up to date with your content.

Also, my captions were quite long since I used them to review the books I posted. The ideal Instagram caption length is between 138 and 150 characters, so I went a little overboard with book reviews. In the future, I will experiment with the length of the signature.