Instagram is enforcing a new limit on the number of hashtags you can include on a single photo or video post.

What are hashtags?

For those with a public account, adding hashtags can help your content show up to those interested in that topic. Whether that means appearing at the top of your follower’s feed, suggested on non-follower’s feeds, in the explore page, at the top of search results or in the Reels tab.

On Instagram, hashtags can be added in the caption or as a comment. They can include numbers but not special characters. 

What are the limits?

Instagram is moving away from its limit of 30 hashtags per post, to a reduced limit of five hashtags per post. The platform shared the announcement of the change in an Instagram post, saying that it will “gradually update the number of hashtags that you can include in a caption for a reel or post to 5”. 

Top tips

Alongside the new hashtag limit, Instagram shared some tips on how you can make the most of hashtags. Even when 30 hashtags were allowed, it was best to limit your posts to around three to five relevant hashtags. With the new limit in place, this approach is now more important than ever.

Focus on using specific hashtags that are relevant to the content you’re posting. This can help your posts reach users who are genuinely interested in that topic, rather than a broad audience that’s unlikely to engage.

Avoid using generic, popular, trending or unrelated hashtags. While these may seem appealing, they may actually harm your content’s reach and performance.

You can still put hashtags in the comments, however these are likely to have limited value or impact compared to hashtags included in the caption itself.

What this means

This move isn’t particularly surprising. Instagram has been testing lower hashtag limits on posts for the past year, and its text-based social media platform, Threads, only allows one tag per post. Both changes point towards a wider strategy of connecting posts to more specific topics, while limiting the ability for spammers to target unrelated, generic, trending topics.

More generally, hashtags play a smaller role in posts’ popularity these days. Instagram has more effective ways of telling what type of content is relevant to what type of audience. Just scroll through Reels or the Explore page, and you’ll soon find plenty of examples of photos and videos that have thousands of likes, are relevant to you and have no hashtags.

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