The short version: Pick 5 to 8 hashtags that mix your niche, your location, and your community, none of them wildly popular, all of them tags real humans search or follow. Stop chasing #instagood and #photooftheday, they do nothing for you. Test a set for two to three weeks, check your reach breakdown under “hashtags” in Insights, and swap out anything not pulling its weight.
What hashtags do for you now, versus what they used to do
Back in 2018 I told clients to stuff all 30 hashtags into every caption. That advice is dead and has been for a while. Instagram’s own team, including Adam Mosseri, has said in public interviews (covered by Forbes and other outlets) that hashtags are not a growth strategy on their own, they’re a discovery layer that sits on top of an already-decent post. If the first 30 seconds of engagement are flat, no hashtag combination is rescuing that post.
What hashtags still do, reliably, is put your content in front of people who follow that specific tag or have engaged with similar content before. That’s it. They’re a small extra door into your content, not the front door.
The three-bucket method I use with clients
I split every hashtag set into three buckets, and I never let one bucket dominate.
- Niche bucket (2 to 3 tags): specific to what the post is about. Not #marketing, but #b2bemailmarketing or #linkedinformarketers. The narrower, the better the audience match.
- Location bucket (1 to 2 tags): especially for anyone with a physical business or local client base. #TunbridgeWellsBusiness beats #uk every time.
- Community bucket (1 to 2 tags): tags built around a shared identity or audience, things like #femalefounderuk or #smallbizowner, where the people using and browsing that tag are close to your buyer.
That gives you 5 to 8 hashtags total, and I have moved almost every client I work with down to that range from the old 20-30 stuffed captions, with no drop in reach and, in most cases, a slight rise in saves and shares because the audience is more relevant.
A real example: the bakery account that had it backwards
A client of mine ran a small bakery near Tunbridge Wells. Her Instagram was using the standard “big” food hashtags: #foodie, #instafood, #foodporn, #yummy, alongside a couple of generic location tags. Reach was stuck around 700 to 900 per post for months, mostly from her existing followers, almost nothing new.
We rebuilt her hashtag set from scratch using the three-bucket method: #tunbridgewellsbakery and #kentfoodie for niche and location, #smallbakeryuk and #supportlocalkent for community. Six weeks in, average reach on posts using that set had climbed to just over 2,200, and roughly a third of that was from non-followers, mostly through the location and community tags. Nothing else changed about her content or posting times. The hashtags alone were doing more work once they matched a real, findable audience instead of a crowded one with millions of competing posts an hour.
The number that matters: how many hashtags to use
Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post. Ignore that number. My working range for almost every account I touch is 5 to 8. Below that and you’re leaving reach on the table. Above 10 or so, you start hitting diminishing returns and, worse, your caption starts reading like spam, which quietly costs you comments and saves because people scroll past it.
If you want a firmer rule to test with your own account: try 5 hashtags for two weeks, then try 8 for the following two weeks, using the same content style and posting cadence, and compare reach-from-hashtags in Insights. Most accounts I have tested this with land somewhere between 6 and 8 as their sweet spot.
Where to find hashtags that aren’t oversaturated
The trick is looking at the “posts” count when you search a hashtag in the app. A tag with 50 million posts is a needle-in-a-haystack problem, your post is buried within minutes. A tag with 10,000 to 200,000 posts is much more workable, your content stays visible in the recent tab longer and the people browsing it are more engaged, not just scrolling past the top nine grid posts.
A few practical ways to build your list:
- Search your main keyword, then look at the “related” tags Instagram suggests underneath.
- Check what hashtags your closest three competitors are using consistently, not just once.
- Search location tags for your town or region and see which ones have an active recent tab, not just a dusty one from 2021.
- Look at what tags show up under posts that get unusually high engagement in your niche, even from accounts smaller than yours.
If you want the fuller breakdown of tools and search methods for this, I go into more depth in my complete guide to Instagram hashtags and follower growth.
Hashtags to avoid completely, no exceptions
Here’s the uncomfortable bit most hashtag guides gloss over: a chunk of commonly used hashtags are on Instagram’s restricted or flagged list at any given time, meaning posts using them can be excluded from hashtag search entirely without you ever being told. Tags cycle on and off this list constantly, and it’s often the generic, spammed-to-death ones like #follow4follow, #likeforlike, or #girl that get hit hardest, though even innocent-looking tags get caught up in sweeps sometimes.
A rough way to check: search the tag yourself and look for a message saying “recent posts are currently hidden.” If you see that, drop the tag immediately, it’s dead weight, and worse, some people believe (Instagram has never confirmed this fully) that having several flagged tags on one post can quietly hurt the whole post’s distribution, not just the hashtag reach. I can’t prove that last part with certainty, but I have seen enough accounts recover reach simply by cleaning out flagged tags that I treat it as true until Meta says otherwise.
Should you put hashtags in the caption or the first comment?
Either works technically, Instagram indexes both. I put mine in the caption now, mostly because comments can get buried under replies fast, and if you’re using the kind of pinned-comment strategy some accounts rely on for FAQs or CTAs, you don’t want your hashtag block competing for that same space. If you’re curious how much pinning a comment helps versus hurts visibility, I broke that down in this piece on pinning a comment on Instagram, it’s doing less than most people assume.
A simple weekly hashtag routine
This is the routine I run for my own account and hand to clients:
- Monday: Pull last week’s reach-from-hashtags numbers from Insights for your top three posts.
- Same day: Flag any hashtag that appears across posts with consistently low hashtag-reach contribution.
- Tuesday: Search two to three replacement tags in the 10k to 200k post range, ideally from the location or community buckets since those tend to shift less often than niche tags.
- Ongoing: Build your sets ahead of time in batches so you’re not hunting for tags at the moment you’re trying to post. This is exactly the kind of prep task that pairs well with scheduling, and I’ve listed the tools that make batching painless in this rundown of free Instagram scheduling tools for small accounts.
- Monthly: Retire any tag that’s been flagged or gone quiet (very few recent posts) and rotate in a fresh one from your competitor research.
None of this takes more than about 20 minutes a week once you have a base list of 20 to 25 hashtags across your three buckets to rotate through, so you’re never using the exact same 8 on every single post, which Instagram’s spam systems can flag as repetitive behaviour over time.
Where hashtags fit into the bigger picture
I say this to every client who wants to obsess over hashtag research for hours: hashtags are maybe 10% of what gets a post seen. The other 90% is whether the content earns a save, a share, or a comment in the first hour it’s live. If you’re starting from zero followers and hoping hashtags alone will fix that, they won’t, not on their own. Pair a decent hashtag strategy with the wider tactics I cover in the quickest way to get real Instagram followers, because reach without the follow-through of a strong profile and consistent posting just leaks away.
Frequently asked questions
How many hashtags should I use on an Instagram post in 2026?
Between 5 and 8 works for most accounts. That’s enough to cover a niche tag, a location tag, and a community tag without your caption reading like spam or diluting reach across too many low-value tags.
Do hashtags still help Instagram reach at all?
Yes, but only as a small extra layer on top of content that’s already earning engagement. Meta has said publicly that hashtags aren’t a standalone growth strategy, they simply put decent content in front of a slightly wider, more relevant audience.
How do I know if a hashtag is flagged or banned?
Search the hashtag directly in the app. If it says recent posts are currently hidden, that tag is restricted and should be dropped from your set straight away, since it’s contributing nothing and may possibly be dragging the rest of your post’s reach down with it.
Should I use the same hashtags on every post?
No. Rotating through a base list of 20 to 25 tags across a few posts, rather than repeating the identical 8 every time, keeps your account looking natural to Instagram’s spam detection and stops you relying on tags that may quietly stop performing over time.
Related reading: How Do You Do Keyword Research on Your Competitors? and How Do You Repost Someone Else’s Reel to Your Instagram (Without Getting Flagged).
I go much deeper on this in the social media marketing guide.
