Was sure hashtag stuffing was dead until a buddy hit 50k views with 30 hashtags

I've been fighting the algorithm for like 3 years now, always trimming my hashtags down to 5 or 6 max because every expert says more than that looks spammy. Then my buddy Dave who runs a small travel page in Austin posts a video of a random taco joint with 30 hashtags crammed in the caption, nothing clever just stuff like #tacos #mexicanfood #austinfood #foodie #yum etc. That thing got over 50,000 views in 48 hours while my carefully curated post with 5 hashtags maybe hit 800. I sat there refreshing my analytics for an hour trying to figure out what I was missing. Now I'm testing 15-20 hashtags on my next few posts just to see if the old rules are dead or if Dave just got lucky. Has anyone else seen a big jump from going crazy with hashtags lately?

3 comments

3 Comments

blake6911mo ago

Dropping to 5 hashtags hurt me too until I tested it myself. What worked for me was going from 5 to 12 on my cooking posts and seeing a solid 3x boost in reach within a week. The trick (from what I've seen) is to mix 5 broad ones like #food with 15 niche ones specific to your city or topic, so you hit both small and big search pools. Dave probably just hit a sweet spot where the algorithm pushed him into discovery feeds, since 30 hashtags can signal the system to show your post to a lot of different interest groups at once.

joseph_torres1mo ago

Exactly 17 hashtags on my chili post got me 4x the usual likes. I used to be one of those people who would copy paste a block of 30 random tags from some Instagram guru's post, and it never did squat for my pages. So when I heard someone say drop to 5 I laughed, but since it bombed I figured what do I have to lose. Now I just throw in my city name, a couple food ones, and some weird ones like #stovetopadventures. Honestly I think the algorithm is just as confused as we are, no one actually knows what they're doing.

hollyc921mo ago

Last month I bumped my hashtags from 6 to 18 on a photo of my dog wearing a silly hat and it got 12k views when my usual posts sit around 800. @blake691 you're probably right about hitting discovery feeds because that dog photo showed up on the explore page for "funny pets" and "dog costumes" both at the same time. The mix of broad and niche tags is the only thing I changed so I'm sticking with 15-20 from now on.