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Instagram now limits posts and Reels to five hashtags, but that doesn’t mean they’ve become completely irrelevant. We look at what hashtags actually do and where businesses should focus instead.
Every few months, someone announces the death of another part of marketing. Email is dead. SEO is dead. Organic social media is dead. Now, apparently, the Instagram hashtag is dead too.
The reality is a bit less dramatic! Hashtags can still play a part in helping Instagram understand and categorise your content, but they’re no longer the reach shortcut they were once treated as. Adding a large block of popular hashtags to the end of a post won’t automatically put it in front of thousands of new people.
Instagram now limits posts and Reels to five hashtags, bringing an end to the days of copying and pasting 20 or 30 tags beneath every caption. The change means businesses have to be much more deliberate about which hashtags they use.
For years, hashtags were treated as one of the main ways to grow an Instagram account.
The usual advice was to use a mixture of popular, medium-sized and niche hashtags. Businesses would build lists of tags, save them somewhere and paste the same selection into every post.
The problem is that this often had very little connection to the content itself.
A business might add hashtags such as #business, #marketing, #success or #entrepreneur simply because they had millions of posts attached to them. The hope was that a larger hashtag would mean a larger audience.
In practice, those broad tags placed a post alongside an enormous amount of unrelated content. They didn’t necessarily help Instagram understand who the post was actually relevant to.
The five-hashtag limit makes that approach much harder. Each tag now needs to earn its place.
Hashtags are better understood as context, rather than a distribution strategy.
A relevant hashtag can help Instagram recognise the subject of a post. It can also help someone who is actively looking for content around that topic find it through search.
For example, #AdditiveManufacturing gives Instagram far more useful information about a technical manufacturing post than something broad like #Innovation.
Later’s current guidance describes hashtags as content classification signals rather than standalone drivers of reach. The quality of the content and the way people respond to it are now far more significant.
That doesn’t make hashtags pointless. It simply means they can’t compensate for content that isn’t clear, relevant or interesting.
Before worrying about the five hashtags at the bottom of a post, businesses should look at the post itself.
Instagram needs to understand what your content is about, but so does the person scrolling past it.
That means making the subject clear through:
Instagram has previously advised creators to include relevant keywords within their content, captions, biographies and hashtags.
If you’re a dog walker in Warrington, for example, the phrase “pack walks in Warrington” within the caption is much clearer than relying on #dogsofinstagram to explain what you offer.
If you’re discussing a technical manufacturing process, use the actual name of the process within the post. Don’t expect five tags at the end to provide all the context.
There isn’t one perfect formula that will work for every business or every post. Your hashtags should change depending on the subject.
A useful starting point might include:
Choose a hashtag that describes exactly what the post is about.
Examples might include:
#PaintProtectionFilm#BinderJetting#AGARepairs#LaboratoryRelocation
This gives the post some wider professional context.
Examples might include:
#AdditiveManufacturing#VehicleDetailing#AccountancyAdvice
Think about the people the content is intended to help.
Examples might include:
#FurnitureFulfilment#ManufacturingSoftware#SmallBusinessAccounting
Location-based hashtags can still be useful for businesses serving a defined geographical area.
Examples might include:
#WarringtonBusiness#ManchesterDetailing#CheshireDogWalker
You don’t need to add a location hashtag to every post. It’s more useful for businesses where location has a genuine bearing on whether someone can become a customer.
This might be your company name, a trade show you’re attending or a campaign that people already recognise.
It shouldn’t be included simply to fill the final space. Use it where it helps connect the post to something relevant.
Probably not.
Some recurring hashtags may remain useful, particularly when your content covers a consistent niche. However, using the same five tags on every post suggests the hashtags are being selected for the business as a whole, rather than the subject of the individual post.
A post about ceramic coatings should use different tags from a post about paint protection film, even when they’re being published by the same automotive business.
The same applies to B2B companies. A post about a new product, a customer project and an upcoming event will each have a different focus.
Choose the hashtags after creating the content, not before.
A hashtag with millions of posts attached to it isn’t automatically the best option.
A very broad tag may technically place your content in front of a larger potential audience, but it also means competing with an enormous amount of content that may have very little connection to your business.
Specificity is usually more useful.
Someone exploring a focused subject such as #TechnicalCeramics is likely to have a stronger interest in that topic than someone browsing a broad hashtag such as #Technology.
The goal isn’t to reach everyone. It’s to make your content easier for the right people to understand and find.
Yes, when they’re relevant.
There’s little reason to remove hashtags altogether simply because their role has changed. It only takes a moment to select a handful of accurate tags and they may still provide useful context.
What businesses need to stop doing is treating hashtags as the strategy.
A strong Instagram post still needs a clear subject, a reason for someone to keep watching and something useful, interesting or entertaining enough to earn a response.
The hashtag can support that content. It can’t do the job on its own.
Review the way you’re currently using hashtags.
If you’ve been relying on a saved block, stop pasting it automatically. Look at each post individually and choose up to five hashtags that genuinely describe its subject, audience and location.
Then use Instagram Insights to compare how different types of content perform. Look beyond likes and consider whether posts are being shared, saved or viewed by people who don’t already follow you.
The question is no longer, “Which hashtags will make this post perform?”
It’s, “Is the content itself worth finding?”
Need help turning your expertise into social content people actually want to read, watch and share? Fenja can help you build a clearer content strategy and put it into practice. Talk to us!
