How Many Hashtags Should You Use On Instagram?

How many hashtags does it take to get noticed on Instagram?

This is one of the questions I hear over and over. Not only am I asked this question repeatedly, but I myself have monitored how my posts do with a lot or a little amount of hashtags in them. Then when I get a response I wonder if it’s a particular hashtag that I used or is it all of them that I used. How to know how many hashtags to use in an Instagram post is the debate of the day!

What Is a Hashtag

For those of you who do not know what a hashtag is, I have a whole blog post called “What is a hashtag?” for you to read!

For anyone that has spent significant time on Instagram – you’ve probably figured out the more hashtags the better. For those in the marketing field – you probably hold to an eye-rolling thought process of … “HOW many hashtags did that person just use?”. For most marketers – hashtag over use is a sign of lacking quality in a post. For the professional, a beautifully created photo that tells a story will be all that is needed to capture views, hearts and engagement. The latter is true and easy to say when you have a full marketing department behind you or your a professional photographer. For those that may not have a professional marketing team – hashtags may be the way to go! I’ll explain:

In a study done by MiniMaxir (source link below), he decided to use Instagram’s API and scan over 120,000 photos to compare hashtag use to likes. The answer … there isn’t a clear answer, but there are some great statistics!

Given that Instagram allows a maximum amount of hashtag use to 30 … he looked at the stats from using 1 hashtag in a post to using 30 hashtags in a post. We also are more concerned with “likes” on the posts with hashtags… meaning … what number of hashtags received the most likes!

As you can see from this diagram below the results are very interesting … 30 hashtags definitely brings the likes. Although if you read the full article – using up to 15 hashtags can bring some really great results too … and those smaller numbers may not annoy your followers who will have to see all those hashtags in your post.