The social media platform Instagram has announced that users will now be able to add a maximum of five hashtags to their post or reel. While informing users about the new update, the company said that it was looking to “gradually update” the number of hashtags that users can include in a caption for a reel or a post to five.
The company also told this the intent behind the limit, saying that the use of fewer and more targeted hashtags rather than generic ones could provide a boost to both the content’s performance as well as “people’s experience” on Instagram.
The company further asked the users to not spam the caption of their post or reel with too many generic or irrelevant hashtags such as #reels and #explore. The company also said that these kinds of hashtags actually don’t help users’ content appear in places like explore, the platform said, adding that it could, however, hurt the user’s content performance.
Instagram has asked users to be intentional with the hashtags that they include, and suggested that they focus on those which are actually relevant to the content. The Instagram said in post on its creator handle that “For example, if you’re a beauty creator, use beauty-related hashtags to help people interested in beauty content find you,”
The platform has started testing this change, which could prove to be a significant one for content creators, earlier this month. The company was reportedly experimenting allowing users to add only three hashtags to each post.
However, the company has not made any formal announcement regarding this test. Some Reddit users claimed that a few accounts were getting error messages while trying to add more than three hashtags to a new post.
The curbs did not affect all the users, thus suggesting that Meta was testing the option with a selected number of users before deciding to launch the limit for everyone.
Syed Ziyauddin is a media and international relations enthusiast with a strong academic and professional foundation. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Media from Jamia Millia Islamia and a Master’s in International Relations (West Asia) from the same institution.
He has work with organizations like ANN Media, TV9 Bharatvarsh, NDTV and Centre for Discourse, Fusion, and Analysis (CDFA) his core interest includes Tech, Auto and global affairs.
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