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.

Information Professionals as Sherpas - Part II

“…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” - Herbert Simon

This is part II of a pair of posts on Information Professionals as Sherpas. You can read Part I in isolation here.

I've written before about the ever increasing mountain of information. Specifically, my point about Sherpas relates to this quote, from this post:

"We’re all aware of the very real danger that libraries could become redundant, with users being able to do their own research, unassisted, and entirely online (hence the phrase you often hear bandied about, that ‘we’re all librarians now’). Who needs a library when you can find everything yourself? The answer to that may be that you need a library as a gateway to information with integrity. The current information-seeking behaviour of our users is simply not fit for purpose for searching on the kind of staggering scale we’ll be dealing with in the near future. You can easily type a key word into a search engine and get a million hits – what we professionals of information can do for you is sort the wheat from the chaff on an epic scale. We can rule out the majority of those hits on the basis of dubious authorship, or validity, or context, or even just quality. And we can provide access to those materials which are legitimate for our users (and must brand this information accordingly, so our users understand the role the library has played in assessing it). These are roles which will become more and more important as the amount of digital information becomes more and more vast. Imagine the available data as an almost random stream of sentences, arranged without rhyme or reason across a hundred pages. You might find a sentence or two which is really useful, but overall the effort required to search through it all would be overwhelming. What the Information Professional can do, is arrange the sentences into paragraphs, the paragraphs into chapters, and provide you with a Contents page, an introduction and an index. More and more, that will become an invaluable service in the Information Economy in which we live."

Edit: Good to see Agnostic, Maybe writing along similarish lines!

There is already evidence that users want some kind of guidance, that simply typing stuff into Google isn't working any more. When Facebook purchased FriendFeed, Mashable posted this interesting article about 'the new search war'. The article suggests that with its 250 million registered users (and that figure is up to 400 million now, according to Facebook's own stats), Facebook has always been in a position to lead the way in Social Search - the web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users - and that now this could come to fruition. The same article also links to a blog post from Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail, among other things), from way back in 2008, in which Buchheit anticipates the power of 'human link data' and suggests it could one day become more useful than 'web link data'.

I already use human link data, in the form of delicious and blogs, and in real-time with Twitter, to get information. Particularly with more qualitative information, I prefer the opinions and advice of my network of peers than just asking Google's non-human algorithms to provide me with information I can trust. There are efforts to formalise this process, such as the search-engine Aardvark,which 'connects users live with friends or friends-of-friends who are able to answer their questions'. The wikipedia article on Social Searchis slightly dated in that it mentions Aardvark, but not the fact that Aardvark was acquired by Google last month, as Google seeks to even the odds with Facebook in the search-war... The recently launched Google Buzz is also an effort to tap into this side of using one's social and professional network as a knowledge pool.

Facebook looks well placed to win this war, which sucks for me as I hate Facebook and want no part of it. But getting relevant information from a network of real people exploits mobile technology a lot better than algorithm-based computing power does,  and in any case, look at how Facebook is grabbing people's internet-attention more and more while Google is declining slightly:

So, all of this points towards a move to more qualified information - information provided by someone you trust to give you the good stuff, rather than an anonymous piece of mathematics proffering you its results. And as I've said before, just as solicitors are the experts in legal matters, we Information Professionals need to position ourselves as the experts in information. The Information Professional has a valuable role to play. In a comment on a blog post about the #echolib debate, Gareth Osler suggested "How about a personal librarians friend on Facebook, someone who could answer questions, and maybe even offer timely advice on information" - which makes sense in this context. It needn't be one individual or one institution who provided that service - in the same way that asking your network for help relies on a number of them definitely being online at any given time, so you could have a network of information professionals, not formally organised, who all contribute to the 'friend' role whenever they are online. Might be interesting to try, and it might increase awareness of what we can do to help people.

Interestingly, there is some argument that the Information Professional could play this role without the platform of the library itself. In response to my entry to the LISNews Essay Contest, a comment entitled We need librarians more than ever; libraries, not so much was left by T. Scott. He argues (and this post is getting long so I've heavily edited this):

Libraries are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. They were built by librarians in order to fulfill our role in society -- to facilitate the connection between people and recorded knowledge for the whole vast range of reasons that this is important to people -- education, entertainment, self-improvement, science, art, religion, fun.... In the print world, building libraries as we have come to know them was the best way to do that. In the digital world it probably isn't.

We need to quit wasting time trying to figure out what the "role of the library" is in the digital age. Who cares? The library is just a tool. We know, if we stop to reflect, what the role of the librarian is -- as I said above, it's to connect people to recorded knowledge. It's the same role that we've always had.

There is an incredible future within our grasp -- but it's a future where our focus needs to be on librarians, not libraries.

Now I'm not convinced about the logistics of information professionals surviving beyond libraries - the issues of lack of collection, lack of funding and budget, lack of actual physical space to engage with people, all seem to point to difficulties there. But it is interesting to consider that in the digital age, the information Sherpa could exist without being tied to the dying building. Naturally I hope the buildings don't die, but I do think that the role of the Information Professional is less dependant on the library than it ever has been before.

- thewikiman P.S - I've just added a temporary page to this website about an upcoming event I'm presenting at. I'm afraid this events is only for CILIP members in the Yorkshire & Humberside region (ironic really seeing as the presentation is about escaping the echo-chamber...) so I don't want to do a proper blog post about it that'll clutter up peoples' Google Readers. But if you're interested you can click on the other pages on this blog link on the right, or just click here instead.