Why hashtags no longer drive growth
For years, hashtags were treated as a shortcut to visibility. Stack enough of them onto a caption, and the algorithm would reward you with reach. Instagram has said otherwise since at least March 2022, when its head, Adam Mosseri, told users he “wouldn’t try to think of hashtags as a way to get more distribution”, as Hootsuite reported. We have spent years researching the perfect mix of popular and niche tags, convinced we would crack the algorithm.
Instead, what we and others have found is that the role of hashtags has changed. They have not vanished completely, but they are no longer pulling the weight they used to. These days, they work more like labels, helping platforms categorise your content rather than push it out to new people.
At AIWIZ, we see the same pattern in our client accounts. Brands that still rely on stacking hashtags for growth tend to be disappointed with their reach, while the accounts that grow are the ones that have moved their effort to content quality and genuine engagement.
What the platforms say about hashtags
In February 2025, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri said in a talk that hashtags “don’t work” to increase reach, as Social Media Today reported. In December 2025, Instagram announced it would gradually limit captions on posts and Reels to five hashtags, saying that “fewer (up to 5) more targeted hashtags, rather than many generic ones, can improve both your content’s performance and people’s experience on Instagram.” It had already removed the option to follow hashtags, telling Social Media Today in November 2024 that people could still use hashtags and search with them. Use a few relevant tags to label the topic, and expect reach to come from the content itself.
Socialinsider’s data points the same way. The analytics company studied more than 75 million Instagram posts published between March 2021 and March 2022 and found that the number of hashtags on a post “does not influence post distribution”, as its co-founder reported in Social Media Today.
X (formerly Twitter)
Elon Musk has been even more direct. On 17 December 2024 he told X users to stop using hashtags because “the system doesn’t need them anymore and they look ugly”, as FOX 5 reported. X’s help centre is milder: it recommends no more than two hashtags per post as best practice, though you can use as many as you like. X’s search rules also list abusing trending topics or hashtags among the behaviours that can get an account removed from search.
LinkedIn told Social Media Today in January 2024 that hashtags help viewers “easily identify what a post is about”, and that it also considers “conversation topics and keywords to help surface relevant information”. The same report cited research by LinkedIn expert Richard van der Blom finding that hashtags were “providing no additional reach boost at all”.
TikTok
TikTok still gives hashtags a role. Its 2020 explainer of the For You feed lists “captions, sounds, and hashtags” among the video information it uses, without ranking them. Its tips for creators say relevant hashtags help the right audiences find a video, but that “more hashtags won’t guarantee a broader reach”. Write captions that say what the video is about, and use Creator Search Insights, which TikTok introduced in March 2024, to see what people search for.
What actually drives social media growth
Your feed content has to hold attention
There is no workaround here. Your main feed is where people decide whether to stick around or scroll past. That is where your best thinking, clearest ideas, and strongest visuals need to live.
The algorithm rewards content that holds attention. Posts that make people stop scrolling, watch to the end, or spend time reading. No amount of clever optimisation fixes boring content. We always start with the message itself before thinking about distribution. If the content is not worth engaging with, nothing else matters.
Shares help you reach new people
Likes are easy. They take half a second and cost nothing. Sharing something is intentional. It means the content was good enough to pass on, useful enough to send, or interesting enough to start a conversation.
Instagram, at least, has noticed. In January 2025, its head Adam Mosseri named watch time, likes and sends as the three signals that matter most for ranking, with likes slightly more important for reaching followers and sends slightly more important for reaching people who do not follow you. The mix varies by platform and audience.
This explains why educational posts, practical tips, and strong opinions tend to outperform polished but forgettable promotional content. People share things that make them look clever or helpful, things that start conversations, things they will want to find again later. If nobody is sharing your posts, that is feedback worth paying attention to.
Social search is changing discovery
This one caught a lot of people off guard. Younger audiences have started treating TikTok and Instagram like search engines, typing queries into the search bar rather than scrolling and hoping for the best.
Google knows this is happening. On 12 July 2022, Prabhakar Raghavan, then the Google senior vice president who ran its Knowledge & Information organisation, said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference that “something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search”. Google told TechCrunch the figure came from an internal survey of US users aged 18 to 24, which it had not made public. That was the company acknowledging, in public, that social apps compete with it for some searches.
In Adobe Express’s 2026 survey of 807 US consumers, 49% said they had used TikTok as a search engine, up from 41% in its 2024 survey, though the share of Gen Z more likely to rely on TikTok than Google fell from 8% to 4%. Recipes, beauty advice and restaurant recommendations were high on the list of what TikTok users searched for in the same survey, Social Media Today reported. Practical stuff. TikTok says 57% of its US users search on the app, and 23% do so within 30 seconds of opening it (TikTok for Business, June 2024 data).
This changes how you should write. Captions need plain language that matches what people actually type into search. Forget clever wordplay that obscures what the post is about. Say what it is. If someone searching for “best CRM for small business UK” lands on your post, that caption should make it obvious they have found what they wanted.
We have started treating social captions the same way we treat SEO copy. Match the intent, deliver the value quickly, write like a normal person. It works.
What businesses should focus on
The shift is not complicated, but it does require changing some old habits:
- Make content people actually want to save or send to a friend.
- Write captions in plain, searchable language.
- Use hashtags sparingly and only when they add genuine context.
- Think about what your audience is searching for, then answer that.
Visibility now comes from being clear and genuinely helpful, not from gaming the system with keyword-stuffed captions and endless tag lists. That approach has run its course.
The fundamentals still apply
Strip away the algorithm talk and platform updates, and the core principle is the same as it has always been. Platforms want people to stick around. Content that is useful, interesting, or genuinely entertaining helps them do that. Content that feels like filler does not.
Tactics come and go. What worked in 2021 looks dated now. What works today will probably need adjusting in a year or two. But making things people actually want to engage with? That part stays constant.
At AIWIZ, we build strategies around that principle. Quality content, understanding what your audience cares about, and growth that does not evaporate when the algorithm shifts again.
Need help with your social strategy?
If your social strategy still leans on tactics from three years ago, it might be time to rethink the approach.
We help brands build content strategies that work with how platforms actually function today. Get in touch with AIWIZ to talk about what that could look like for you.