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Kyle Fernandez-Taylor March 29, 2022 A 2 minute read

In 2022, will hashtags still work? The answer may surprise you!

Does hashtagging work the way you expect it to?

The simple answer is no hashtags do not work at least not in the way you think. As Mosseri said hashtags themselves will not boost your interaction or views simply just by adding them but it does help the algorithm identify what sort of content you’re posting.

From what he’s said we can now see that hashtags are more so an aid to boosting your interactions by helping the algorithm identify what you have posted and so it can rank the content accordingly and show it to the right audience to maximize you reach.

If you look at your statistics the hashtag reach will be low however your explore reach and home reach will go up compared to a post without hashtags as it uses the information from the hashtag and combines it with the image recognition to train the algorithm.

So, what can I do to get the most out of hashtags?

First of all, you should make the hashtags as descriptive as possible. Think about how the algorithm will categorise this post and what can I tell it so it understands who to show it to. You generally want to use 2-4 descriptive hashtags about what the most important things are in the photo such as #carshop #nissangtr then you want 4-6 contextual hashtags such as who is the post. For a example of this is #carracing #mechanics #driving.

What should you not do?

Do not use random hashtags as the new algorithm doesn’t just give you reach for putting a random word anymore as it matches the hashtags with the image recognition and will detect it as hashtag spam if the photo has irrelevant hashtags not corresponding with the image and could even misrecognise what you’re posting.

So are hashtags actually useful in 2022?

The answer is yes! Its more important than ever. Even though they may not work as they used to and give you reach directly from it it plays a huge role in identifying your image and showing it to the right audience which can result in better quality follows you may get from the post!