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That one guy at the coffee shop who told me my hashtags were 'too desperate'
I was sitting at a coffee shop in Austin last Tuesday, tweaking a post for my shop's Instagram account (you know, trying to show off a fresh brake job I did). This older dude next to me glances over and says 'hey, you're using way too many hashtags, it looks desperate.' I laughed it off at first, but then he spent 10 minutes explaining how Instagram's algorithm actually sees a pile of hashtags as spam. He said he used to work in social media for a local news station and saw their engagement tank when they went over 5 hashtags. I trimmed mine from 20 down to 6 on that brake job post and it got double the likes and a real comment from a potential customer. Has anyone else run into a random stranger who actually knew their stuff about algorithms?
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derek99417d agoMost Upvoted
Actually the thing about Instagram's algorithm treating too many hashtags as spam isn't totally accurate anymore. Back in 2021 they changed things so the first 3-5 hashtags are what actually get indexed for search, and the rest are basically ignored not penalized. I remember reading a study from a social media analytics firm called Later that tested posts with 3, 10, and 30 hashtags and found no significant difference in reach beyond the first handful. Your improvement more likely came from narrowing down to hashtags that actually matched your content instead of spraying 20 random ones.
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dylanmurray17d ago
And here I was thinking my carefully curated 30 hashtag strategy was actually doing something. Turns out Instagram probably just ignored most of them anyway and I was just flexing my ability to copy and paste a block of text nobody reads. I spent a solid year believing the algorithm was filtering me for spamming when it was really just me being bad at hashtag targeting. Honestly feels like when I realized "reply all" on work emails is rarely necessary but I kept doing it for years. So basically I could have just posted three decent hashtags and saved myself the wrist strain from all that typing. Live and learn I guess, or keep making the same mistake until someone on the internet explains it to you.
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