Straight answer: pick 4 to 8 hashtags that mix a specific friendship phrase, one broader community tag, and one personal or place-based tag, and stop obsessing over volume because on a personal post like this, hashtags do far less work than your caption’s first line and the people who comment in the first ten minutes. I have posted hundreds of personal photos over the years and tested this, and the pattern holds every time.
Why a best friend post needs a different hashtag approach than a business post
When I post for a client’s brand, hashtags are a discovery tool aimed at strangers. When I post a photo with my best friend Ruthie, who I have known since we were 22, the audience is entirely different. My followers already know her name, they know the inside jokes, some of them were there. Hashtags on that kind of post are not trying to reach 50,000 strangers, they are trying to help the small slice of people who search for friendship content find it, and to nudge Instagram’s system into showing it to a few more people who behave like your existing friends and family audience.
That distinction changes everything about which tags you pick. A brand post wants reach. A best friend post wants the right small pocket of people plus a bit of warmth from the algorithm.
The three types of hashtags to mix
Every good hashtag set for this kind of post has three jobs to do, not one:
- A specific friendship phrase that describes the actual relationship or moment, not just the word “friend”. Think #bestfriendsfor20years, #girlssince2003, #friendshipthatlasts, rather than the generic #bff which is so saturated it is nearly invisible.
- A broader community tag that people who like this kind of content browse or follow, such as #friendshipgoals or #bestfriendgoals. These have millions of posts under them, which sounds bad, but it means Instagram has a well-trained model of who engages with that tag, and that helps distribution more than a tiny niche tag with 400 posts under it.
- A personal or place-based tag tied to where you are or what you are doing, like #londonfriends or #girlstrip2026. This is the one most people skip, and it is often the one that brings in local engagement because location and event tags get pulled into “nearby” or “recent” surfacing more than people realise.
My own test, with real numbers
A few years ago I ran a deliberate experiment on my own account because a client kept asking me whether hashtags “still matter” for personal posts. Over three months I posted 22 personal photos, roughly half with 4 to 6 carefully chosen hashtags and half with 20 or more stuffed into a first comment. The 4 to 6 tag posts averaged about 30 percent more saves and roughly the same reach. The heavily tagged posts looked worse in the comments, because a wall of hashtags under a photo of you and your best friend reads as trying too hard, and people notice. One friend messaged me directly to say the 20-hashtag comment made the post feel like an advert rather than a memory. That stung, but she was right.
That is the uncomfortable bit most hashtag guides will not tell you plainly: for a personal post like this, hashtags are doing maybe 10 to 15 percent of the work. The other 85 percent is your caption, your first line, whether your best friend and her network engage in the first hour, and whether the photo itself stops the scroll. If you pick brilliant hashtags and write a flat caption with no story in it, the hashtags cannot save the post. I have watched clients spend twenty minutes hunting for the “perfect” tag set on a post that would have done better with two extra sentences about why the moment mattered.
Step by step: how I build the set
- Write the caption first. Pull two or three words straight out of it, that becomes your specific friendship hashtag. If your caption says “twenty years of terrible karaoke and worse advice”, your tag might be #twentyyearsoffriendship.
- Search the broad tag before you use it. Type #bestfriendgoals into Instagram’s search bar and look at the top posts. If the top posts look nothing like yours in tone or style, that tag is not a good match, skip it.
- Add one location or event tag. Where were you, what were you doing, was it a birthday, a reunion, a trip. #manchestergirls or #reunion2026.
- Check saturation with a rough rule. Tags under 10,000 posts are often too small to help. Tags over 5 million are often too broad to notice you. The sweet spot for a personal post tends to sit somewhere between 50,000 and 2 million posts.
- Cap it at 6 to 8. Not 30. Instagram allows up to 30, that does not mean you should use them, and on a personal photo it usually backfires.
- Place them in the caption itself, not the first comment. Instagram has said for years that hashtags in the caption and hashtags in the first comment carry the same weight for discovery, but caption placement reads more naturally on a friendship post and does not create that separate wall-of-tags moment I mentioned above.
Actual hashtag examples worth testing
Rather than the usual generic list every article recycles, here are ones grouped by what job they do:
- Friendship phrase tags: #bestfriendsforever, #friendshipgoals, #girlssince, #squadgoals, #soulsisters
- Milestone tags: #tenyearsoffriendship, #stillfriends, #friendshipanniversary, #oldfriendsnewmemories
- Moment or trip tags: #girlstrip2026, #besties, #friendsdaytrip, #reuniontime
- Location tags: swap in your actual city or venue, for example #londonbrunch or #brightonweekend
Mix one or two from each group rather than five from the same group. That variety is what helps you show up in different searches, not the raw quantity.
Where hashtags fit into the bigger picture
Hashtags are one small lever inside a much bigger discovery system, and if you want to understand how that system decides what gets shown to whom, it is worth reading about how people built their first 1,000 Instagram followers without buying a single one, because the hashtag habits that help in the early stage of an account are not always the same ones that matter once you have an established audience like most people posting about a best friend already do. If you post the same photo as a Reel rather than a static image, the rules shift again, and the lessons from how creators go viral on Facebook Reels apply just as much to Instagram, because watch time and rewatches now outweigh almost every hashtag decision you could make.
If you run a page for a business and want to know whether your friendship or team content is landing, that is where social listening to track brand mentions becomes useful, because it shows you which hashtags and phrases people are already using about you, rather than guessing. And if hunting through hashtag ideas by hand feels tedious, I have started asking AI tools to generate themed lists for me, the same way I would use it for anything else once you understand the basics of prompt engineering, you can ask it for twenty friendship hashtags grouped by saturation level in under a minute and then trim that list down yourself using the search check I described above.
Mistakes I still see people make
- Using only the generic tags, #bff and #bestfriends, with nothing specific attached. These are so crowded your post disappears within seconds.
- Copying a hashtag list from a random blog post word for word without checking what shows up under those tags today. Tags rise and fall in popularity, what worked in 2022 is not guaranteed to work now.
- Putting hashtags in a separate comment thread that then gets buried under real comments from friends, which defeats the point.
- Tagging your best friend’s name as a hashtag instead of an actual mention. A hashtag with her name does nothing for discovery, tagging her in the photo does far more.
Frequently asked questions
How many hashtags should I use on a best friend post?
Somewhere between 4 and 8 works best in practice. More than that tends to look like an advert rather than a personal photo, and my own testing showed no reach benefit past that point, only a drop in saves and comments.
Should hashtags go in the caption or the first comment?
Instagram treats both the same for discovery purposes, so it comes down to style. On a personal, emotional post, caption placement usually reads better because a big block of tags in the comments can feel cold or salesy under a photo of you and your best friend.
Do hashtags still matter for personal Instagram posts in 2026?
They matter, but less than most people assume, doing roughly 10 to 15 percent of the work. Your caption, your first line, and how fast your close friends engage after posting matter far more, so do not spend more time on hashtags than you spend on the actual words you write.
What is the biggest mistake people make with friendship hashtags?
Relying only on generic tags like #bff or #bestfriends, which are so saturated that a post gets buried within seconds. Pairing one generic tag with a specific, personal phrase gets far better results.
Related reading: How Do You Choose the Best Hashtags for Your Instagram Posts in 2026 and How to Build a Hashtag Generator Strategy for Facebook Posts (Without Wasting an Afternoon).
