Are hashtags dead in 2025?

[BetterTelephone5001]

For discovery, I’d say they’ve been dead for a long time. I only recommend them if there’s truly some reason for us to track an effort across content and partners. Otherwise it’s dated, and I don’t think they’re remarkably useful. Maybe a sweeps if you’re still doing those. It just all feels like old social from 8+ years ago.

[Competitive_End4940]

Yes.

[Putrid_Lettuce_]

I feel like they work on tiktok because people actively search tiktok. But i’m pretty sure the ceo of instagram said hashtags won’t do much

[Complexity444]

Hashtags don’t carry the same weight they once did, now the focus is more on engagement signals like watch time and shares. Consistency and timing matter a lot, and pairing that with some outside support from something like crescitalypanel can help keep momentum steady.

[No_shecher_5528]

By all accounts, hashtags no longer warrant a big investment of time. I recommend still using a few, especially branded hashtags, but not the 30 they used to recommend.

[Any-Permission9779]

These days, captions, timing, and shares matter way more for reach.

[confusedwithmoney]

The only thing that pushes content in 2025 is how people interact with it – watch time, saves and shares. You could stack 30 hashtags, but if nobody watches past 3 seconds, it won’t matter.

[Acceptable_Sir2169]

Yup…RIP

[Waste_Insect_2963]

Think your captions as hashtags. Each word in the caption acts as a hashtag

[Specific-Power-8343]

They aren’t very useful right now, people have become almost 100% visual

[Old_Category_248]

If you’re doing Social Media ads for your products, yeah it’s still useful. other than that, nah.

[lepa-vida]

I use it if I want to emphasize an important word.

[HotFriedPickles98]

Key words help with your SEO

[LoriRenae]

Hashtags come from a time when that was the only way to link content, and the bots couldnt even read the tweets.

All you are doing is putting data into your content so the machines can look for what to tag it. It cant tell that if you wink in the video, the words spoken were a sarcastic joke. So maybe you put #joke and thats gunna recolor the entire piece of content.

But if you make a tiktok ranting about the government you dont need to put #politics. The whole dang video is politics. “it” knows, whatever it may be, whether thats the algorithm or search or whatever.

We’re back to using hashtags for their original purpose. If you start a series of videos where you talk about your dogs surgery you might help yourself by putting #dogjourney2025 in every post, so the algorithm knows those are linked content. If there is a social movement and you want your video shown to people who are getting interested in that movements content, put the hashtag in your videos. If you wanna talk to your followers about the movement indirectly, dont.

(for the record I dont work in social media this all speculative)

[BeKonstructiveM]

We generally only use two types of hashtags on content these days:

1) Branded
2) Hashtags for events or time-sensitive news – trending things like breaking news, sporting updates, Met Gala etc. Or events like conferences.

How useful they actually are varies from platform to platform but we find it is generally better to include the terms you want to be found for in the caption, not the hashtags. It will be interesting to see if/how this will change with Instagram content now becoming discoverable in Google search…