A guy at a Denver meetup said to stop using hashtags on Reels, and my views dropped 40% in two weeks
He ran a small page with about 8k followers and swore hashtags were killing his reach. I tried it on 12 Reels and watched my average views fall from around 3,200 to 1,900. Maybe it works for some accounts but it clearly did nothing good for mine. Has anyone here tested no hashtags vs 3 to 5 and seen a real difference, or did I just mess up the switch?
I ran a similar test back in March with my cooking page, 3 to 5 hashtags versus zero on 20 posts each. The no hashtag group lost about 30% of its reach but the weird part was my saves and comments went up, so the views that did come in were more real. I went back to using 4 or 5 niche ones, nothing generic like #food or #viral, and my views came back to normal in about 3 weeks.