How Many Instagram Hashtags Ought to You REALLY Use?

One of the most important steps in building trust in a relationship is persistence.

… should someone mention that to Instagram.

The folks at Instagram headquarters have been turning things upside down lately. The company-supported Instagram Creator Account recently recommended that it Best practice to only use 3 to 5 hashtags per post.

Source: @Creator

Let me repeat that: three! To! Five!

While this seems like a harmless hot tip, it’s a confusing thing to hear straight from a platform that allows you to use it up to 30 hashtags in every post.

This revelation from someone we trusted raises so many questions: Was that a test? Are you cheating on us? If 3 to 5 is the amount you actually want to use, why would you even give us the freedom to use 30 tags?

But even if the ground is shaky below us and the truth may slip through our fingers like sand in one of those timers that you’ll instantly lose from your Pictionary set, I refuse to point out the thousands of social media managers on the all over the world join existential spiral about it.

Instead, I get my groove back, aka, take steps to find out what is really, really, exactly true: Are 5 hashtags optimal or 30?

Experiment time!

Hypothesis: 3-5 hashtags give you the same reach as 30

Here are the facts: If you have a caption for your Instagram post, you can add up to 30 hashtags. But now Instagram itself reports that you should limit your tagging to 3 to 5 for the best reach.

By comparing several similar posts, I’m trying to see if a shorter, curated list of hashtags will do as much for me Engagement on Instagram than maximize. (Ask DM me for an address to send McArthur Genius Grant money to.)

methodology

To make sure I had a good amount of data for this experiment, I decided to use a popular wedding-related Instagram account that I have behind-the-scenes access to.

This account has over 10,000 followers, and I figured it wouldn’t be uncommon for audiences to post extremely similar content every day. I would keep the photos as similar as possible, and keep the captions themselves short and sweet to avoid distorting the interaction with one especially great recording or, uh, extremely funny text.

I posted 20 photos this month. Ten of these posts contained 30 hashtags. For the other 10 posts, I limited myself to 3 to 5 hashtags.

To build my selection of 30 hashtags I used the website Display purposes, which generates a list of the most popular tags on a particular topic – in my case, I received lists related to weddings and the location of those weddings (British Columbia, Canada).

I chose the 3 to 5 hashtag posts based on my gut feeling: and my gut feeling was usually: “Tag it with #wedding and two other obvious things.”

So which method has prevailed: cautious tagging or a more-is-more approach?

Results

TLDR: Don’t bother maximizing your hashtags – it certainly won’t help you and may even hurt your reach a bit.

When I visited my Instagram Insights to see reach per post, I found that my post with the highest reach reached 943 people and my post with the lowest reach reached 257 people.

This senior post? It only contained three hashtags: #wedding day, #wedding, and #wedding decor.

The second highest post contained only four hashtags: #weddingday, #bride, #elope, and #elopement.

However, as we moved the list down, it jumped back and forth fairly regularly between posts with lots of hashtags and posts with only a few selected ones. I’ve put all of the reach data in a table to determine the average reach for each post style.

The conclusion? Fewer hashtags have a slightly better reach on average.

Reach of the posts with 3-5 hashtags
Reach of posts with 30 hashtags

943 743 813 488 605 434 413 411 411 397 360 356 293 327 263 265 262 262 257 257

AVERAGE REACH: 462
AVERAGE REACH: 394

The range isn’t much bigger … only 15% in this very small, very specific, very wedding related experiment. But still! It seems to indicate Maxing out your hashtags is a waste of time at best. In the worst case, it could even affect your range.

Take a look at Hootsuite Analytics, in terms of actual likes and comments, the number of hashtags didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

For example, if we look at the six highest engagement posts, three of them had minimal hashtags and the other three had 30 hashtags each. Even-Steven.

What do the results mean?

As usual, this experiment is certainly not final and your mileage may vary with your own hashtag. But here are my personal takeaways from these results:

It’s a good idea to have a few hashtags …

Compared to previous posts on this account that didn’t use hashtags, these posts have a wider reach. So there is some value in including at least one hashtag in your post. Having 3 to 5 specifically certainly didn’t hurt and provided an opportunity to reach a few different potential audiences. What do you have to lose?!

… but don’t bother, 30. to put

I don’t know if I can say for sure that 3 to 5 hashtags with this data is the optimal number for Instagram. But what I could say is that more hashtags don’t necessarily mean more reach. Maximizing my hashtag count to 30 did not have any positive effect on these posts. Instead of cluttering your caption with tags, it’s probably better to use this space to mention other accounts, start a conversation, or show off that sparkling sense of humor.

High engagement comes from great content, not the right number of tags

The engagement here was actually quite low given the number of followers this account has. My guess is that it was because I didn’t provide very much detail in these captions and didn’t necessarily work on encouraging engagement in other ways. (For example, ask questions, include user-generated content, comment on posts from other accounts and other things We list how to build Instagram engagement here in this guide.)

The point is: engagement is not easy to achieve and cannot be conjured up by the perfect combination of hashtags. It takes time and care.

Okay, that’s an end to this test – but there are more social media science accomplishments as to where this came from. Check out the rest of ours Hootsuite experiments here!

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