New clients are always confused on my philosophy around hashtags. I am not one to use them lightly and you’ll never see them splashed all over any of my client’s posts. And that’s the opposite of most social media consultants.

Why? I prioritize being able to read a post over searchability. I have found that any post is more likely to get increased engagement if it’s highly readable. Adding a crapload of hashtags to a post makes it less readable and therefore more likely to be skipped over.

I’ve tested and tested this out, and every experiment has come out proving that belief. So I don’t rely on hashtags to do the work for me. I instead focus my efforts on making content as good as it can be, which is a much better use of your efforts when you want to increase reach and engagement.

But I do use hashtags in a very controlled and focused manner. And they work beautifully for me when I do that.

So let’s get into it and talk about hashtags.

Hashtags and Facebook

Every time I speak, I say something along the lines of, “If you want to use a hashtag on Facebook, it has to be worth punching a puppy over.” People giggle like I’m not serious. No. I’m totally serious. Ask any client who has ever received a picture of a puppy from me after they tried to use an unnecessary hashtag.

Why are they unnecessary? Have you ever actually clicked a hashtag on a Facebook brand page? If you have, let’s talk, because I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has done that unless they are the owner of that page. It’s just not something that happens. That means that any hashtag in a post is actually just taking up space and making it more difficult to read the post. That means more people will be skipping past your post. In other words, those hashtags are making it more difficult to get through.

HOWEVER, there is one reason to put a hashtag in your post that I can fully get behind: To promote a hashtag you’d like your fans to use so you can collect content. For this case, I would only use the hashtag once within the caption. Every other time should be at the end of the caption to make it easier to read your post. And I’d even suggest putting it on images to remind your fans of its existence.

Hashtags and Instagram

I discovered this on accident. I was rushing around one day and forgot to put the hashtags on an Instagram post. When I checked back on the post a couple hours later, I realized the reach and engagement were exactly the same as those with ALL the hashtags. It was curious. And then Instagram announced that hashtags were more about categorizing content rather than extending reach. Even more curious, but I never changed strategy on hashtags and Instagram. Did that have something to do with social media strategists calling my clients to say my way of doing it was wrong? Yes that did happen multiple times, and it is absolutely the reason.

Hashtags on Instagram are less about extending your reach and engagement and more about aligning your posts with a specific community. So that absolute mass of general hashtags you’re using under a post? It’s likely not getting you anything. But those super specific hashtags that align you with a particular community on Instagram? That could do something for you. You are then more findable to members of that community, and they can connect with you.

And one more thing: Putting that block of hashtags in that caption? It’s working against you. People do not read long captions and even though it’s not technically a part of the caption, you made it a part of it by putting it there. And the caption is then less likely to be read. Put it as the first comment instead. Then those hashtags will disappear into the comments. It makes the caption so much easier to read for your followers, so it’s more likely that they’ll actually read that caption.

Hashtags and Threads

All of these networks I have talked about thus far are obviously owned by Meta which means their rules are similar-ish. Threads has one very unique feature though: You can only use one hashtag. If you’re doing a big long story and need multiple connected threads, you can bypass that limit and use a different hashtag on each of the individual threads.

But… much like Instagram, this is just to align your post with a particular community. So you should only do the multiple hashtags if your post is applicable to multiple communities. Most posts aren’t. If you’re still all like, “That’s nice but mine actually does,” then we will go back to the Facebook example: Is it worth punch a puppy over? It could be that relevant that it actually is. But chances are that it’s only relevant to one community and you only need to use one hashtag to connect to that community.

Other networks

We could go through the other networks one by one. But really I’d be saying the same things over and over again. Hashtags just aren’t the same as they were when they were key to getting your tweets seen on Twitter. If you want to increase your reach and engagement, you should be focused on creating content your audience wants and will interact with. There is no longer some magic wand that will make up for bad content. So don’t count on that and just put the work in that your audience deserves.

How are you using hashtags now? Has it changed over the years?