Your social media planning just got a bit easier. Hashtags no longer matter.
There is no one way to market anything. Marketing is an ever-shifting landscape that can wildly fluctuate from week to week. A decade ago, what made someone a social media guru is now considered common knowledge. The same will be true for the tricks and tips used by professionals today in as little as six months. As algorithms shift, so must our marketing efforts, and the latest change we must embrace is the imminent death of hashtags.
In March, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said that Instagram hashtags don’t “really” help with post distribution in one of his Stories. That announcement goes against the thinking taught by social media professors, wizards, and internet hucksters for over a decade. There are countless pet parents and Instagram moms with notes in their Notes app filled with hashtags for specific types of posts. Trust me—I am one of those pet parents.
The team at Socialinsider decided to dig deeper into Instagram’s data to understand Mosseri’s comments better. They analyzed 75,361,233 Instagram posts published between March 2021 and March 2022 to see whether Instagram hashtags play a role in post views, calculated as the average engagement rate by impressions.
The research shows that the number of hashtags an Instagram post has does not influence post distribution.
As you can see in the graphic below, there are no significant differences in the average engagement rate by impressions values of the Instagram posts analyzed, despite the number of hashtags.
There is a logic behind these findings. Instagram hashtags were never designed to increase reach or engagement. The goal of hashtags—on IG and elsewhere—is to categorize content for other users to make it discoverable.
The key here is the word discoverable. Hashtags make it easy for users to find content related to specific topics, such as #cooking or #heavymetal. But users still have to use those hashtags to find that content before reach or engagement increases.
Ask yourself: How often do you click on hashtags?
I’ve never intentionally clicked on an Instagram hashtag to see similar content or find new creators. I cannot recall one instance when I used music-related hashtags to discover new artists or find the next song that changed my life. Maybe I’m an exception to the norm, but I doubt it.
Even Instagram doesn’t rely heavily on hashtags for discovery. Instagram’s main source of discovery, the Explore page, utilizes a complex algorithm that considers followers, past likes, most viewed content, and various other factors when determining which content to show users. Hashtags likely factor into the equation, albeit at a much lower capacity than the aforementioned elements.
That does not mean hashtags are dead—at least not yet
The highest average engagement rate by impressions (3.41%) is generated by posts with 3-4 hashtags. That comes as no surprise – Instagram itself has previously noted that keeping between 3-5 hashtags is the best strategy to adopt when dealing with post distribution.
To dig further, Socialinsider added a ‘Follower Count’ parameter to ensure that they were looking at equal comparisons.
The data shows that there aren’t any major differences in the average impression rates of the Instagram posts analyzed when looking at the number of hashtags and followers. However, depending on the profiles’ following base, there are some nuances.
As you can see in the graphic above, big account (50K and 1M followers) impression rates decrease as they use more hashtags. The same is true for small accounts (5k-10k followers), although the decline is less steep.
That said, it’s still a good practice for small accounts to include fewer hashtags (focusing on 5-6 hashtags) to achieve the best engagement rates. The same trend applies to mid-sized accounts, with 10K – 50K followers, which should use more 5-6 hashtags to ensure higher impression rates.
Where do we go from here?
Hashtags are not quite dead, but their utility in social media is beginning to wane. If you choose to continue using hashtags, keep it to 5-6 hashtags per post. When you’re ready to make a significant change, try posting with fewer hashtags and see what, if any, impact that switch has on your engagement.
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