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.

Library marketers! Don't fall into the trap of thinking TikTok is just a young person's platform...

There’s some really interesting data I’d like to present in this post for your perusal, so I’m going to put it at the top as a sort of tl;dr version - but obviously please do carry on reading for the context of why it matters!

So here it is. Broadly speaking, we think of Facebook as being for older people, Insta and TikTok as being for younger people, and Twitter* for being somewhere in the middle - the sweet spot for that 25-34 demographic. However:

Twitter has around 127 million users aged 25-34, where as TikTok has 256 million users aged 25-34. In other words there are more than twice as many 25-34 year olds on TikTok (the young person’s platform) than there are on Twitter (the 25-34 year old’s platform!).

Remarkable, eh? But why does this matter? Recently I was working with a library on their marketing, and asked them if they'd considered using TikTok. No, came the reply: our average user is 28 years old, an age more associated with Twitter demographics.

First of all, kudos to the institution for a) knowing useful demographic data and b) using it to inform their decision-making! We all need to do more of that.

However there's a risk that we can let the dominant narratives about social networks disguise important insights: in this case, the idea that TikTok is full of young people (which it is) obscured the fact that there are SO MANY people on the platform overall that it's useful library marketing for all age-ranges.

These days accurate Twitter user-figures are hard to find, but here's what I discovered via Statista. There are around 335 million users of the platform, a massive 38% of whom are in the 25-34 age bracket. So: 127 million people in the age range for the target 28 year old. And no other social network that I looked into had such a high percentage in this particular group: so far, so good for Twitter.

However! Whilst only 16% of TikTok users are in the same 25-34 age-range, that's 16% of 1.6 billion users - this amounts to 256 million people in total. In other words *twice as many 28 year olds are on TikTok than are on Twitter.*

Only 8% of TikTok users are aged 35-44 like me (I am clinging on to that age-range for another few months before I get promoted to the 45+ one!) but in my own experience if feels chock-full of them... I drum for a band that exclusively plays 90s Dance music - trust me when I say, people aged 35-50 love it but it's of very little interest to anyone younger! And yet we do very well on TikTok (more so than Insta or Twitter or Facebook) because it turns out, there are a lot of nostalgic people in their 40s on there, who want to see a band play the song Renegade Master live on stage (42,000 views and counting) 😄

Anyway. The point is that TikTok is an option worth considering (in the long term its battles with the US Government may, or may not, change that) even if you don't consider your library's key demographic to be especially youthful. It's always worth looking deeper at the numbers behind the narratives, and how they relate to YOUR library community.

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*I'm just not going to say X. I'm not going to say X, formerly Twitter. It's too annoying. I'm just going to say Twitter, forever.

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.