Should Hashtags be used at ALL?!

[speedypro]

Let's say I post something with hashtags today at 8 AM, and I don't do one follow or one like, we can say that the majority of my added followers for the day after are coming from that hashtag, no ?

That is still conjectural... The likes may be coming from previous posts. The post before. The post the day before. Or the ones 4 days prior as posts now have longer media lifespan.
Or people randomly stumbling over your profile.

The only way that scenario would work is for you to go cold turkey for a month. Don't post anything. Then do one post but it will still be conjectural. And then you have to wait 3-4 days later to see if any of those follows unfollows you because they may be bots..

The bot likes on my insights dont even register. It may say 3 follows and I'll see 30 follows within second and those 30 follows disappear 2 days later.. Yet, the 3 follows in insight still stays because they are real people. The 30 where bot API follows. And it is obvious because the likes comes exactly 2 seconds after you post and the follow right after that.

 

[fxmanaged]

At least for our page (and these results are only based on a few days of testing, so they may not be scientific yet), reducing the hashtags from 5-10 a post from our prior technique of using 30 (and swapping them on every post from a group of 5-8 different sets) is greatly reducing the total likes as well as the daily follower growth. Consequently, if reducing the tags by that much does not produce greater engagement and follower growth, I'm not sure how using no tags at all can be beneficial. Again, these results are far from scientific yet.

 

[Simox123]

At least for our page (and these results are only based on a few days of testing, so they may not be scientific yet), reducing the hashtags from 5-10 a post from our prior technique of using 30 (and swapping them on every post from a group of 5-8 different sets) is greatly reducing the total likes as well as the daily follower growth. Consequently, if reducing the tags by that much does not produce greater engagement and follower growth, I'm not sure how using no tags at all can be beneficial. Again, these results are far from scientific yet.

Same, I keep using 30 hashtags (but rotating and adapted) in each and everyone of my posts, people can do whatever they want I'm just advising, some of my posts go viral and i'm ssure that's with the help of the hashtags.

 

[1Enigma]

I've seen all sorts of threads about people either bashing or defending hashtags.

Some say that using 30 hashtags will inevitably lead to getting shadow banned.

Some say that traffic from hashtags is negligible and that the only people that check if their post appears on the top 9 grid are marketers themselves. I think this is a little hard to believe because how do regular people search for content within Instagram if it's not with hashtags?

Some recommend to use all 30 hashtags because it will get you the most engagement and give you the highest chance for your posts to be found.

Some say to minimize hashtags to 5-15 and make them very specific for each post.

So what is it then? It sounds far fetched that Instagram will start punishing people for using the very core they initially shoved down their user's throats, but then again, Google did the same thing with backlinks a while back.

What is your view on the ideal way to use hashtags and have you seen any studies that confirm your beliefs?

By the way, what we've always done with hashtags is use all 30, but have multiple sets of different tags that we rotate on every post.

The Seo Gods told me hashtags, and those symbols(alt-145) can rank because some people use them in search engines.

 

[fxmanaged]

Same, I keep using 30 hashtags (but rotating and adapted) in each and everyone of my posts, people can do whatever they want I'm just advising, some of my posts go viral and i'm ssure that's with the help of the hashtags.

Agree, I feel the same way. On all our business pages, across different industries, I have seen greater engagement and follower growth when the hashtags are used. Furthermore, some people on social media are writing now that the hashtags should be part of the captions and not the first comment (which was the way we have always used them to make the captions look cleaner and less spammy) to avoid getting shadow banned. I have not noticed a difference in engagement though and shadow banning because of the location of your hashtag set would be pretty stupid.

 

[altec32]

yes my man. HTs can be big. Lots of IG users explore and follow HTs