Before you move on, thinking this is a post about how hashtags shouldn’t be used, WAIT! I believe in hashtag usage and use them myself! What I’m talking about is the hashtag usage where there is really only hashtags and very little if any content to the message. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but when one social media platform is feeding to another, we tend to forget who may be seeing our messages. How many hashtags are too much? Why am I mentioning this? When I’m on Instagram, I expect to see tons of hashtags for each photo, but when I find that same photo showing up in my Facebook newsfeed, I’m not expecting a ton of hashtags. I’m expecting a story to go along with the photo.
I’m not the only one who has this train of thought. People gravitate to different social media platforms for different reasons and expectations, and we as brands need to respect what they want. In a post on the Buffer blog, Kevan Lee breaks down where to plaster the hashtags and where to use sparingly. As far as Twitter (the originator of the hashtag) goes, Kevan says,
Tweets with hashtags get two times more engagement than tweets without.
But what he says just a little further down is very eye-opening!
When you use more than two hashtags, your engagement actually drops by an average of 17 percent.
I will say here that I’m unsure of when this post actually went out, and stats can change frequently. However, I’m seeing similar things on other websites. Instagram is on the opposite spectrum from Twitter. According to Kevan, Instagram engagement is the highest when there are 11 or more hashtags. I actually find this humorous as this is what I’m seeing stream from Instagram to my Facebook feed.
But, according to Phillip Ross of the SocialBakers, engagement can drop as much as 50% or more if there are more than 10 hashtags used.
My focus with this post was to compare Instagram and Facebook. I covered Twitter mainly because it is one of the social media platforms that Instagram can publish to. The other one is Facebook, and Facebook is a totally different animal; since, it is so new on the hashtag scene. As with Twitter, hashtags can be useful, or it can be detrimental to your brand. William Miller of the SocialBakers published a study of hashtag usage on Facebook, and it is very similar to hashtag usage on Twitter. The SocialBakers looked at branded posts for a month and found that 1-2 hashtags per post had an average interaction of 593. When the hashtags swelled to 10+, the average interactions dropped to 188. That is truly a stunning drop! The article that I linked above has a great graph for you to see the drop at each of four levels of hashtag usage.
I encourage you to visit all of the posts that I linked to and read it for yourself. I do like hashtags, but what I was seeing was photos in my Facebook newsfeed with only hashtags. I would have liked to be able to read about the picture, but I gave up with all the hashtags. I think the reason of what we are seeing in these posts is that people don’t expect 10 or more hashtags in their Facebook newsfeed or in their Twitter newsfeed. Honestly, Twitter is only 140 characters. With all those hashtags, is there any content left in that Tweet? When I Instagram with the intent of my photo going to Twitter and Facebook, I limit the number of hashtags I use. When I am sharing something only on Instagram (rarely), I use as many hashtags as I want, but in all reality, I may only use 5 or so. I want people looking at my photo to see what it is about, not just see hashtags. Maybe I’m not seeing things as I should, but I’m not here for just myself, I’m here for you the reader.
What are your thoughts about hashtag usage?
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