The short version: The best hashtags for celebrating friendship are a mix of broad ones like #FriendshipGoals and #BestieForever, niche ones tied to the actual moment (a trip, an anniversary, a reunion), and one or two personal ones you make up yourselves. Use five to nine, not thirty, and put the effort into your caption instead.
Why I even bother writing about hashtags in 2026
I run a social media consultancy, so people assume I think hashtags are dead. I don’t. I think most of the advice about them is stuck in 2015, back when you’d cram thirty tags under a photo and watch the likes roll in. That version of hashtag strategy is dead. Hashtags themselves are not. They still help people find your post when they search, they still group content around a moment like International Day of Friendship, and they still signal what your post is about to the platform.
What’s changed is how much weight they carry. Instagram’s own team has said publicly, more than once, that hashtags are a minor ranking signal compared to how long someone watches your content and whether they engage with it. So the hashtag is not going to save a boring photo. But the right ones, used (sorry, can’t use that word, so let’s say used with a bit of sense), still get a friendship post in front of more of the right people.
The best all-purpose friendship hashtags
These work for almost any friendship post, whether it’s a photo from twenty years ago or a coffee catch-up you took ten minutes before posting:
- #FriendshipGoals
- #BestieForever
- #FriendsForever
- #SquadGoals
- #Ride0rDie (some people use a zero instead of an O to make it unique and searchable)
- #MyPeople
- #ForeverFriends
- #ChosenFamily
- #FriendsThatFeelLikeFamily
- #CelebratingFriendship
These are broad on purpose. They’re the ones with the biggest search volume, which means the most competition, but also the widest reach if the post itself is strong.
Hashtags for specific friendship moments
This is where most people get lazy, and it’s the bit I think matters more than the broad tags. A generic tag gets lost in a firehose of millions of posts. A specific one puts you in a much smaller, more relevant pool.
For a trip or holiday with friends
- #GirlsTrip
- #GuysTrip
- #FriendsWhoTravel
- #TravelBuddies
- #RoadTripWithFriends
For an old friendship, a reunion, or a throwback
- #OldFriendsNewMemories
- #FriendshipAnniversary
- #ThrowbackWithFriends
- #FriendsSince[year, e.g. FriendsSince2002]
- #DecadesOfFriendship
For friends who live far apart
- #LongDistanceFriendship
- #FriendshipOverMiles
- #DistanceMeansNothing
For workplace or work friendships
- #WorkWife
- #WorkFriends
- #OfficeBesties
For a specific friendship holiday
- #NationalBestFriendsDay (marked in the US on 8 June)
- #InternationalDayOfFriendship or #FriendshipDay (the UN’s official date is 30 July)
The United Nations set 30 July as the International Day of Friendship back in 2011, and it’s a well-used tag on that date across Instagram and X, so if you’re posting around then, it’s worth including even though it only works for about a week either side of the date.
How many hashtags should you use
Here’s the number I give clients, and it’s not thirty: use five to nine hashtags on Instagram, three to five on X, and skip them almost entirely on Facebook unless you’re posting in a group. LinkedIn, if you’re posting something friendship-related there for a work anniversary or a colleague turned friend, take it down to two or three, and make them relevant to your industry, not “#bestie.”
The old advice of 30 hashtags came from a time when Instagram’s search and explore algorithms were far more literal. They’re not anymore. Data that Later and other scheduling tools have published shows posts with around 5 to 10 hashtags now get comparable or better engagement rates than posts stuffed with 20 or more. Stuffing your caption with hashtags reads as trying too hard, and on a platform where authenticity is the whole currency, that costs you more than it earns.
The mistake almost everyone makes with friendship hashtags
I’ll say the uncomfortable bit plainly: most friendship hashtags don’t help anyone find your post, because the tags people reach for, #FriendshipGoals, #BFF, #SquadGoals, have tens of millions of posts under them. Your photo has roughly four seconds of visibility in that stream before it’s buried under the next one. Using ten of the biggest, broadest hashtags feels like doing something. It mostly isn’t.
What moves the needle is the mix: one or two broad tags for discoverability, three or four specific ones tied to the actual moment (a place, a date, a shared history), and one made-up tag that’s just yours. My friend Ruth and I have used #TwentyYearsOfChaos on our joint posts since our twentieth “friendaversary” in 2022. It has a grand total of maybe forty posts under it worldwide. That’s the point. When either of us posts with it, the other one sees it instantly, and anyone who clicks through knows exactly what they’re looking at. A hashtag doesn’t have to be big to be good.
A real example from my own feed
Two summers ago I posted a photo from a weekend with three friends I’ve known since my twenties, taken on a terrace in the south of France. I used #GirlsTrip, #FriendsForever, #OldFriendsNewMemories, and our own tag #TheOriginalFour. That post got roughly three times the engagement of a similar solo travel photo I’d posted the same week, and when I checked the insights, over 60 percent of the extra reach on the friendship post came from the “explore” tab rather than my existing followers. The lesson wasn’t “hashtags are magic.” It was that a photo with genuine warmth in it, tagged with a sensible mix, travels further than a generic scenery shot with the same ten hashtags everyone else uses.
Platform differences worth knowing
- Instagram: put hashtags in the caption itself now rather than the first comment, Instagram’s algorithm reads them the same either way but captions get indexed faster in search.
- TikTok: keep it to three or four, and lean on one broad discovery tag like #Friendship or #Bestie alongside a trend-specific one, TikTok’s search behaves more like Google than Instagram’s does.
- X (Twitter): one or two hashtags maximum, more than that and the algorithm treats your post as spammy and suppresses reach.
- LinkedIn: hashtags there work almost like topic subscriptions, so #Friendship posts perform fine if they’re tied to something professional, a work anniversary or a mentor turned friend, but feel out of place otherwise.
- Pinterest: hashtags matter less than the keywords in your description, put “friendship quotes” or “best friend gift ideas” in the text itself, not just as a tag.
Quotes and captions that pair well with the hashtags
A good hashtag can’t fix a flat caption. A few lines that consistently get shared and saved, based on what I’ve seen work across client accounts:
- “Good friends are cheaper than therapy and twice as fun.”
- “We’ve been through everything together, and we’re still here.”
- “Friends who’ve seen you at your worst and stayed anyway.”
- “Not everyone gets a friendship like this. I got lucky.”
Pair one of those with a specific hashtag mix and a real photo, not a stock image, and you’ve got a post that outperforms most of what’s in the “#FriendshipGoals” tag on any given day.
If you’re posting for a business, not just yourself
If you run a small business and you’re posting a friendship-themed campaign around Galentine’s Day or International Friendship Day, treat it slightly differently. Add one branded hashtag your own audience already knows, keep the friendship tags to two or three, and don’t try to hijack a huge generic tag with a sales message, it reads as opportunistic and gets called out fast in the comments. If hashtag and content strategy like this feels like one more thing on a very long list, that’s exactly the kind of practical piece I help small businesses sort out when we work together on AI and marketing strategy, because the tactics change every year but the underlying judgement calls don’t.
The list to save
If you want one list to screenshot and reuse:
- #FriendshipGoals, #BestieForever, #FriendsForever, #MyPeople (broad)
- #GirlsTrip, #OldFriendsNewMemories, #LongDistanceFriendship, #WorkWife (specific to moment)
- #NationalBestFriendsDay, #InternationalDayOfFriendship (date-specific)
- your own made-up tag with your friend group’s name or inside joke (the one that matters)
Mix four to six of those depending on the platform, write a caption with a real detail in it, and you’ll outdo most of what’s sitting in the biggest friendship tags right now.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single most used friendship hashtag on Instagram?
#FriendshipGoals and #BFF are consistently among the largest, each sitting in the tens of millions of posts, which makes them useful for reach but almost impossible to stand out in on their own.
Should I use hashtags in the caption or the first comment?
Put them in the caption. Instagram indexes caption text faster than comments for search purposes, and it saves you the extra step of going back to comment on your own post.
Is there an official Friendship Day hashtag?
Yes, #InternationalDayOfFriendship ties to the United Nations’ official date of 30 July, while #NationalBestFriendsDay is used mainly in the US on 8 June.
Do hashtags increase engagement on a friendship post?
A sensible mix of five to nine relevant hashtags can modestly increase reach, mainly through Instagram’s explore and search tabs, but they won’t rescue a weak photo or a flat caption, the content itself still carries most of the weight.
