How many hashtags is too many hashtags?

I just ran a social media workshop in which one of the brilliant attendees posed this age old question:

“We’ve been having a huge debate about using hashtags. Are they still a thing? Should we be using them?”

— Catarina

As I answered I realised I have a pretty definitive idea about not just whether we should be using them - yes - but also how many we should be using, which varies wildly by platform. So if you do social media for your organisation or otherwise create content, and you’ve ever asked yourself how many hashtags is too many hashtags, read on!

Three disclaimers before we start:

1. Hashtags are the cherry, not the cake. The content of your post is waaaay more important than the tags - but using hashtags well WILL improve your posts’ discoverability.

2. It’s more important to use the right hashtags, than the right number of hashtags. What is going to help people discover your post? What do people who need your content search for? Hint: adding a universally used hashtag (like #love for example) simply won’t do anything positive. If everyone uses the same hashtag, your post joins an almost infinitely long queue of other posts. Aim for the sweet spot between high volume hashtags that everyone uses, and low volume hashtags that no one will ever search for. For the librarians and archivist out there: hashtags are basically metadata!

3. The info below is really just my views, as of late May 2025, built on my own experience and reading others’ research, rather than the ‘right’ answer… Use this as a jumping off point and conduct your own experiments!

How many hashtags should I use on TikTok?

Use 3-5 hashtags on TikTok. Ignore the super-cool TikTok accounts that use no hashtags at all, or the desperate accounts that use 20 hashtags like #fyp #ForYouPage and #viral. 3 to 5 hashtags on TikTok will help the algorithm push your content in relevant directions -any more and it will basically get confused… Remember, the majority of TikTok posts are seen by people who DON’T follow the accounts posting them - so use every advantage available to you to get eyes on your videos.

How many hashtags should I use on Insta?

Use 9-11 hashtags on Instagram. This one is controversial because it directly contradicts Instagram itself, which advises using 3-5 hashtags max in this useful post about how they work and what they’re for. However, there are countless examples of companies doing analysis of thousands or even millions of posts, and finding that 10 or even 20 gets better results than 5. This study looked at 38 million posts and found that 11 was the optimum number of hashtags. Too many hashtags can definitely feel spammy, so don’t go above 11 - but using several of the RIGHT hashtags really seems to pay dividends. Finally - and this is really annoying but everything I’ve read confirms it’s true - don’t use the same ones for each post. You need to mix them up a little, and avoid two posts in a row with the same tags. Gah.

How many hashtags should I use on Facebook?

Use 0 - 2 hashtags on Facebook. Hashtags are less important on FB than on TikTok or Insta, but they can help your post show up in searches. Don’t crow-bar them in, but take opportunities to use them organically in your posts.

How many hashtags should I use on Bluesky / Threads?

Use 0-2 hashtags on Bluesky, and Threads. You don’t have to use any at all, of course. The way hashtags are used on these platforms is more like a form of curation - for clicking on and finding related posts, rather than particularly for search. On Bluesky using certain hashtags will also push your post into certain custom feeds - be careful not to abuse this by over-using them!

How many hashtags should I use on YouTube?

Use 3-5 hashtags on YouTube. YouTube is interesting in that it works completely differently to all other platforms listed here: for a start, it has a seperate ‘tags’ section when you upload. Here you can put all the tags you want to help with discoverability, and they won’t be readable by other people - they just help with searching. So use this freely and fill it right up. Secondly, you can put hashtags in the description - or you can put them in the title. With YouTube shorts in particular, putting a hashtag in the title - IF it’s something people will likely be searching for - can be really beneficial. Thirdly, if you use too many hashtags in the description or title, YouTube literally ignores them completely. So don’t do lots! One or two max in the title, and a couple more in the description, should do it.

How many hashtags should I use on LinkedIn?

Use 2-5 hashtags on LinkedIn. A haphazard approach doesn’t work well here: use one or two tags which are specifically relevant to your industry and your post (and avoid the generic, overused cringey ones like #productivity…).

How many hashtags should I use on X?

It doesn’t matter. Just get off it. You’ll feel so much better.

Instagram for Libraries

If you do one thing differently with your library social media this year, what should it be?

The local knowledge you have of your library and your community always beats generic advice online - this article included - so if you already know what you want to focus on, I’m not telling you what you should do instead. Go with your instincts. But if you’re wondering about where to put your energy over the next twelve months, I’d suggest Instagram.

Twitter / X remains pretty vital to libraries, but for how long? It seems to be imploding, and people are leaving it in droves. Plus, many libraries have been developing their twitter accounts for years, whereas Instagram is still (relatively) new and can often benefit from some strategic attention.

Facebook remains essential for most public libraries, and continues to offer diminishing returns for the other sectors. I recently ran a marketing workshop for an academic library who’d lost their Facebook account through no fault of their own and were planning on starting again; don’t bother, I told them. I’d love to be free of Facebook - it’s such a problematic site and its increasingly difficult for libraries to get enough return on the time they invest in it.

Another reason not to worry too much about Facebook is it frees up time to spend on social media platforms with more impact. We only have so much time and we shouldn’t spread ourselves too thin; it’s better to do a small number of things well than be everywhere but not have time to do anything with full commitment. Which is also the reason I’m not recommending a focus on TikTok. It is the coming platform for sure: as of September 2021 it reached 1 billion users (becoming the fastest social network to do so, beating Instagram by 2.5 years) and a scarcely believable 167 million videos are watched per minute on the platform. But TikTok is something which takes a lot of time and energy, so perhaps it’s one to focus on if you’re absolutely nailing all your other social media profiles already… My biggest issue with it from a library point of view is that I can’t see a way of using it really well without the need for someone to appear on camera. If you look at @ToonLibraries (my favourite library TikTok and the best example I’ve found on how to do it well) it’s clearly the brainchild of a particular librarian with a real affinity for the platform - she’s in most videos because TikTok is a very personal medium, unlike Instagram or YouTube which can be both personal and impersonal. It requires a physical presence on screen. I’m not prepared to do that, nor ask anyone else to, so for that reason I’ve registered my library’s username so no one else can claim it in the meantime, while I wait for a suitable use case to present itself!

So to Instagram, then. It’s the third most popular social network (behind Facebook and, if you count it as social media, YouTube) with 1.4 billion active users. It is full of creative people. It is photo-and-video led but doesn’t JUST contain images. And it is, fundamentally, a nice place to market your library! It’s fun. The community are responsive. Instagram is an ever-growing site and very popular with younger people. For public and academic libraries it is essential - for school libraries it can be brilliant. For special libraries your mileage may vary.

So how do you go about using Instagram as a library, or indeed any cultural organisation? I’m starting the year with a series of posts about this: find the Instahacks mini series here.

Firstly how to make the case for creating a library profile if you don’t have one already, then getting started and how it all works, before moving onto the specifics: how to use Stories, and how to use Reels.

In the meantime you can see if I’m running any social media workshops online, or get in touch to book some training / a workshop for your organisation.

Social Media: The best times to post

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I like an infographic that actually tells us something useful. So, following the 'social media image sizing' one from a few weeks back, here's a 'when to post' infographic from QuickSprout.

I didn't used to think social media timings were important, but increasingly I think it is worth trying to hit times of peak engagement IF you're tweeting or posting something important, particularly when using social media as an organisation rather than just for yourself. If you've put effort into creating useful content, you want as many people to see it as possible.

Image courtesy of QuickSprout - click on it to view it on their site

Size matters: Cheat Sheets for Optimal Image Sizing and Update Length on Social Media

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This posts features two massive infographics: thanks to Darren Jones and Claire Dolan who I saw tweeting about these a while back.

First of all we have the Social Media Design Sizing Cheat Sheet

The Omnicoreagency.com cheat sheet below shows you exactly how big (to the pixel) the images for each element of your social media profile need to be. This is genuinely useful for organisations on social media, as you can get a huge amount of customer interaction via Twitter and Facebook; the wrong sized image will either be distorted to auto-cropped in your profile or header pics, which undermines how professional you appear. Consistency is important on social media for organisations, but you can't literally use the same image in all circumstances because the dimensions won't be appropriate.

So for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and (both) Google+ users, here's all the info on image sizing you'll ever need...

(Scroll waaaay down to below the infographic to find a tool which will resize your images for you!)

Second of all we have the Social Image Resizer Tool

So perhaps you're convinced that size matters when it comes to social media images - but wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to actually crop your images yourself? All that faffing about and resizing to the exact pixel.

Well step forward the Social Image Resizer Tool - give it your image, then choose from various Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google and YouTube image sizes and it'll crop your image down to the right proportions.

Click to go to open the Image Resizer Tool in a new window

Finally we have the Optimal Length of (almost) Everything Online Cheat Sheet

This one from Buffer is less definitively useful, but interesting all the same. Which length of Tweet, hashtag, Facebook update, blog headline, email subject line etc gets the most engagement? Glad you asked, right this way:

Steal this: Student Guide to Social Media

If you click the image below, you'll be taken to the Student Guide to Social Media. This is an interactive online resource, giving information on various social media platforms, and on tasks you can accomplish using social media - it is aimed primarily at undergraduates but has applications across the board. It is made available under a BY-NC-ND Creative Commons licence: in other words if you think this resource might be of use to YOUR students, feel free to use this, link to this, make it part of your own institution's website, just as long as you credit the creators (the BY part), aren't using it for commercial purposes (the NC part) and use it entirely as it is, in its current state, rather than creating your own version or derivatives (the ND part).

Alternatively, book mark libassets.manchester.ac.uk/social-media-guide/ or click the link to open the resource in a new window.

A Northern collaboration

The resource is the result of a joint project between the Libraries of the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and York, developed over the Summer. Michelle Schneider from Leeds' very successful Skills@Library team approached me about working together on a social media resource for undergraduates - I was extremely pleased she did, because it was something on my list to do anyway.

There's a lot of support out there for postgrads, academics, researchers generally in using social media, but I don't think there's as much for undergraduates. It's an area we're looking to expand at my own institution, and as well as face-to-face workshops I really wanted something that worked as an interactive learning object online, probably made using Articulate / Storyline. Imagine how pleased I was, therefore, when Michelle told me the other collaborators would be Manchester, including Jade Kelsall, who is absolutely brilliant with Articulate! I'd worked with Jade before at Leeds; she provided all the technical expertise to create the Digitisation Toolkit (using the Articulate), one of the parts of the LIFE-Share project I actually enjoyed. Also on the team were Carla Harwood at Leeds, and Sam Aston at Manchester.

So we got together, brainstormed on lots of massive pieces of paper, photographed the paper with our ipads, emailed each other a lot, and came up with a resource which we think will be really useful. I feel quite bad because I was off on paternity leave for a month of this and it took me ages to get back up to speed, so I don't feel like I contributed enough compared to Jade and Michelle who worked tirelessly on this (sorry guys!) but I'm really pleased with the result. It's gone down very well on Twitter, and I was excited to see we've found our way onto a curriculum already:

Look what we're using in iSchool #infolit class today! @shelldaynight @jadekelsall @tribigild @theREALwikiman http://t.co/5sk5PfcZKR

— Róisín Cassidy (@Roisin_Cassidy) November 5, 2013

How it works

Increasingly as I do more and more teaching, training, and planning, I'm aware that when introducing people to new tools (or trying to help people use existing tools better) you have to give them two different versions of the same core information. The first and obvious thing is how to use a tool - e.g. here's Twitter, here's how you create an account, here's some tips on using it. But this assumes some prior knowledge - what if you don't know why you'd need Twitter? So you also have to present the information in terms of tasks people want to achieve: "I want to boost my professional reputation" is one such task, and Twitter would be among the tools you might recommend to achieve this. The great thing about using Storyline is we can do exactly that - students can explore this resource by tool, or by task, or both.

We've also included case studies (some video, some not) and I'm indebted to my colleague in the Career's Service at York, Chris Millson, for providing a lot of really useful information about both tools and tasks and sourcing case studies...

The resource is, deliberately, very straightforward. We stripped out everything non-essential to give students easily digestible, bite-sized introductions to the various things they might want to use these tools for (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare, Google+, Academia.edu, blogs etc). It's also relatively informal without attempting to be in any way cool or streetwise. I've showed it to some of my students in info skills classes already and it's gone down very positively; I think even students who are very au fait with web 2.0 tools still appreciate some guidance on how to meld the social with the academic and the professional.

So, check out the Students Guide to Social Media, tell us what you think, and if you'd like to steal it, feel free.