Hashtags Just Don’t Mean What They Used To

There was a time not all that long ago where a post on just about every major social platform required hashtags in order to be found. In fact, it got to the ridiculous stage when users stuffing 20 or more into a post in an effort to boost discovery. Those days are now over, as TikTok has become the latest platform to cut back on hashtag importance.

TikTok has been notifying users lately that it now has a 5 hashtag maximum, which follows on the heals of X, LinkedIn, Threads, and Instagram.

It seems that the admins of these platforms have been observing their misuse all along, and their reaction now is to dial back their importance. In fact, Instagram has gone as far as to say that hashtags have zero bearing on engagement any more, which implies that they’re a waste of time.

This claim was actually verified by the team at SocialInsider, as they analyzed over 75 million IG posts to find out if hashtags were all that important. The conclusion – they’re not!

As what frequently happens on social network changes, there was no formal announcement from TikTok, with only private communication to users intimating that the change in approach for hashtags “aims to improve the user experience” by reducing clutter on posts in-stream, combating spammy usage of tags, and “improving the relevance of content discovery,” through more focused use of tags by creators.

Frankly I think that this is a welcome change, as hashtags never seemed to be worth the trouble anyway. Most of them were vanity tags, and if you seriously did the research to find one best suited to your post, it could take more time than initially creating the post.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were gone from our lives within five years, at which time we’ll look back and wonder why we were so fixated on them in the first place.