People Aren’t Using Hashtags Anymore
If you’ve noticed that more and more of the accounts you follow on social media are no longer making use of hashtags—and that your posts with hashtags aren’t as effective as they used to be—well, it’s not a coincidence.
The thing is…people just aren’t using hashtags anymore. Or at least, they’re not using hashtags as the powerful marketing tool they were 10 years ago. While hashtags can still be effective, don’t count on them to help your post go viral.
Quick Refresher: How Do Hashtags Work?
Hashtags were born on Twitter back in 2007 when social media was an entirely different landscape than it is today. Back then, your Twitter feed was a chronological thread of posts from the people you were following. There was no algorithm to prioritize posts that were the most popular or show you what you were most interested in. And while you could search for tweets from a certain user, you really didn’t have the option to search for tweets on a certain topic.
That changed when Twitter introduced the option to use the pound symbol (what we now know as the hashtag symbol) in front of a word. Whenever somebody clicked on that hashtagged word, it would take them to all tweets using that specific hashtag.
This lets people filter relevant content and see posts about what they were interested in: news events, pop culture, politics, sports, and even social movements.
Hashtags exploded in popularity and made their way from Twitter to other social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Today, TikTok is the latest major platform where users rely on hashtags to help them filter content.
The Problem With Hashtags
From a marketing perspective, hashtags seem like the type of thing that a business could make great use of—after all, if you create a memorable hashtag for your brand, then all of a sudden, you have all the content related to your business on the platform converged in one thread. Great, right? In theory, yes.
The problem is that you don’t have control over that content. Think of when McDonald’s tried to encourage its customers to use the hashtag #McDStories and share positive stories they have from patronizing McDonald’s. Within only a couple of hours, the hashtag was overwhelmed with so many negative tweets that McDonald’s had to cease the marketing campaign. Some marketers would argue that any publicity is good publicity—but if a brand as big as McDonald’s feels negatively affected by the way followers hijacked a hashtag, think about how it could hurt a small business. Some users have even observed that hashtags are an easy mark for spammers and bots to take over the comments and replies.
Algorithms Don’t Need Hashtags
In addition to helping users filter content, the other benefit of hashtags was that they helped algorithms target the right audience for your post. If you were somebody who was constantly liking posts with the hashtag #smallbusiness, then Twitter or Instagram would send you more posts with that hashtag.
But today’s algorithms are more advanced than that. They can show relevant content regardless of what hashtags you use. You no longer need to search for #smallbusiness. If your content is related to small businesses, the algorithm can detect this from keywords in your caption information and show your content to people who have liked small business content in the past.
If You Do Use Hashtags
Because social media platforms tend to be elusive about how their algorithm works, it’s not definite that hashtags don’t do any good. In fact, they might bring you a minimal amount of extra traffic—just not as much as they once did. If it’s not an inconvenience for you to type out so many hashtags, go for it. It won’t do anything to hurt you.
Be smart about your hashtag use. Keep your hashtags to a minimum and focus on hashtags that are as specific to the post content as possible.
Change up your hashtags regularly so you are not using the same hashtags over and over again. This strategy will not only give you a chance to test the success of new hashtags but will also stop your posts from being spammy.
Above all, remember that social media is about fostering relationships with the followers your account does have. Instead of trying to expose your content to newcomers for a one-time like and comment, focus on high-quality interaction with the people you know and appreciate what you have to offer.