Do Hashtags Still Help Your Reach.

Short answer: on Instagram, no. Hashtags are a categorisation signal, not a distribution lever, and the person who runs Instagram has said so more than once over several years.

On TikTok they are one classification input among several. On LinkedIn the head of product calls them a nice to have. That does not make them worthless. It makes them metadata: they help a platform file your post and help a person find it in search. The argument keeps coming back because the app itself says otherwise, and because the effort is quietly expensive.

The short answer, platform by platform

• Instagram: hashtags help the system work out what a post is about and put it on a hashtag page. They do not increase reach.
• TikTok: hashtags sit inside what TikTok calls video information, alongside captions and sounds, used to classify a video and match it to interested viewers.
• LinkedIn: hashtags are a topic term people can search. The feed no longer needs them to work out what a post is about.
• All three: the number is not the lever. Relevance is the only property any platform claims for them.

One sentence for the team: hashtags are search metadata, not distribution.

What the head of Instagram has actually said

Adam Mosseri has answered this question repeatedly, and the answer has not moved.

Replying to a user question in Instagram Stories in March 2022, he said hashtags “do help us to understand what a post is about, which means it might be more likely to show up in a place like a hashtag page, for instance, but in general, no, I wouldn’t try to think of hashtags as a way to get more distribution”.

On Brock Johnson’s podcast in April 2025 he was blunter: “Hashtags are no longer a primary way to increase your reach on Instagram. They don’t significantly increase your reach on Instagram, contrary to popular belief.”

And in a question and answer session reported in June 2025, the same position again: “Contrary to popular belief, hashtags are not a way to get more reach. They’re a great way to let people know what your post is about and connect posts… They’re useful for things like search, but generally speaking, no, hashtags do not improve your reach.”

Note what he never says. He does not say hashtags do nothing. He says they describe. That is a keyword’s job, which is why social search on Meta is the more useful frame for the whole question.

Why the app tells you the opposite

Instagram’s composer has prompted people to add relevant hashtags “because hashtags can help you reach more people who are into those topics”. That is the platform’s own interface making a reach claim the head of the platform has denied.

Both things can be true without anyone lying. Interface copy is written by a different team, at a different time, for the median user, and it describes an intention rather than a measured effect. Ranking systems get rewritten far more often than the prompts sitting on top of them.

So treat a prompt as a prompt. The composer also offers you a location and an alt text box, and nobody builds a growth plan around either.

Following a hashtag has gone away

Instagram removed the ability to follow a hashtag in December 2024. Its own statement at the time: “We’re removing the ability to follow a hashtag on Instagram. You will still be able to use hashtags in your posts and search with a hashtag to discover related posts.”

LinkedIn went the same way. Its head of product, Rishi Jobanputra, said in July 2025 that the platform used to have a hashtag feed, that people were not really using it, and that LinkedIn was in the process of getting rid of it.

That is the most useful fact in the whole argument. A hashtag used to be a subscription: someone followed one, and your post appeared in their feed. On the two platforms where brands put the most effort into tags, that route no longer exists. What is left is search and classification.

TikTok and LinkedIn are not Instagram

The platforms genuinely differ, so a blanket rule gets one of them wrong.

TikTok has described its recommendation system since 2020 as weighing user interactions, device and account settings, and video information, which it defines as “details like captions, sounds, and hashtags”. TikTok names hashtags itself, as one input among several. Its search surface is also somewhere people deliberately go, which makes the words you attach worth choosing properly.

LinkedIn runs the other way. Jobanputra’s summary was that hashtags are a nice to have, not a need to have, because the feed’s models have got better at understanding a post from the post itself.

Instagram sits between them. Same syntax, three different jobs.

The number is not the lever

There is no settled best number, and anyone giving you one is guessing. No platform publishes a target, and the guidance that does exist points at relevance rather than volume.

Every platform allows far more than anyone needs, and teams read the allowance as a recommendation. A ceiling is not a target. No platform has ever said that filling it helps, and the composer will happily let you do something the ranking system does not reward.

Independent evidence points the same direction. Socialinsider analysed more than 75 million Instagram posts published between March 2021 and March 2022 and found the number of hashtags did not influence distribution.

Name the caveat: that is an analytics vendor publishing research about a metric its own product reports on. It is quotable because it agrees with the platform against its own commercial interest. Stay sceptical of any tool-vendor study that concludes you need the tool.

The cost nobody counts

The reach argument is not really the point. The cost is.

Put your own number on it. Suppose choosing a set takes six minutes: pulling last month’s list, checking a tag is not dead or blocked, swapping in something topical, pasting it in. Six minutes, five posts a week, two people, and you have spent most of a working day every month on metadata the platform says does not move reach.

That calculation is easy to avoid, because hashtag work feels good. It is visible, it is finishable, it produces something you can show a manager, and it can be done thoroughly while the harder job goes untouched. Deciding what a post is actually about has no obvious finish line.

Usually this is a process problem rather than a judgement problem. Nobody chose to spend the time, the step simply never got removed, which is exactly what a serious look at the workflow behind the content is for.

A standing rule you can put in your template

Relitigating this per post is worse than getting it slightly wrong. Write one rule, put it in the content template, stop thinking about it.

• Keep a fixed house list of tags per brand, written once and reviewed quarterly.
• Take up to five per post from that list: one category, one niche, one brand.
• Choose for accuracy, not size. A tag with millions of posts behind it describes nothing.
• Never research new tags per post. A campaign or event tag is a decision, not a ritual.
• Cap the whole step at under a minute. If it takes longer, the list is the problem.
• A hidden block of tags in the first comment is the same work moved somewhere less visible. The question is not whether it dodges anything, it is why the time is going there at all.

The rule does not need to be optimal. It needs to be decided, so nobody argues about it in a review again.

How to tell whether it was the hashtags or the content

Most hashtag tests are unreadable, because the thing that varies most between two posts is the posts. If you want a verdict worth acting on:

• Change one thing, across a run of posts, never a single one.
• Compare like with like: same format, same topic area, same slot in the week.
• Use enough posts that one strong performer cannot carry the result.
• Do not run it in a week when anything else moved: a new hook style, a new length, a new posting time.
• Read the metric the change should affect. If tags were doing distribution work, it would show in reach from accounts that do not follow you, not in total impressions.

Expect the answer to be no detectable difference. That is not a failed test, it is a result you can act on, because it releases the time.

Where that time is worth more

Move it to the front of the video. The opening seconds decide whether anything else you made gets seen, and no tag has ever rescued a start that gave the viewer no reason to stay. The same goes for the thumbnail, the title and the first line of the caption.

Then move the rest into words. Search behaviour inside social apps is the genuinely growing thing, and it rewards plain language in captions, on-screen text and spoken audio: describing what the thing is in the terms a person would actually type. That is the case behind the shift to keyword-driven social strategies, and it is where hashtag effort belongs.

Which is the same job hashtags were meant to do. Telling a platform what your post is about still matters. A tag list is just the weakest available way of saying it.

How NBK thinks about hashtags

NBK treats hashtags as a settled, low-cost step in the publishing process, not a growth tactic. They live in the template with a fixed list and a time cap, and the argument does not get reopened per post.

The reason is the operating model. Social output is a system with a finite number of hours in it, and every ritual surviving on habit takes hours from something that moves the number. Organic reach comes from what the content is, how it is packaged and how consistently it ships.

When a team asks whether hashtags still work, the better question underneath is usually where their week is going.

Next step

If your social output feels busy but not effective, start by auditing where the time actually goes. Count the minutes on every step nobody has questioned in a year, hashtags included, and ask what each buys you. If the answer for one of them is nothing, you have found capacity without hiring anyone.