Hashtags that come from your post, not from a list

A hashtag is a saved search, not a label

Every hashtag is a query somebody else runs. That reframing settles most of the decisions: a tag nobody searches brings nobody, and a tag a million people search buries you within seconds.

The useful band lies between the two, where a tag is specific enough to have an audience and narrow enough that your post sits near the top of it. So a good set is layered: one or two broad tags for the category, two or three naming the subject, one naming this post specifically.

In the example above, #Microservices is the category, #DevOps the audience, and #ZeroDowntimeMigration the search only somebody with this exact problem runs. It reaches fewer people, and the people worth reaching.

One post, tagged twice

The block that goes on every post

#marketing #business #growth #tips #success #entrepreneur

Drawn from the post itself

#B2BSaaS #PricingPage #ChurnReduction #SaaSMetrics

Formatting rules that actually break things

• Capitalise each word. #ZeroDowntimeMigration, not #zerodowntimemigration. Networks treat the two as one tag, but screen readers read the capitalised version word by word and run the lowercase one together.
• No spaces and no punctuation. A hyphen, an apostrophe or a full stop ends the tag at that character: #back-end posts the tag “#back”.
• Do not open with a digit, and never post a tag of digits alone. Behaviour differs between networks, and a numeric tag is the least reliable thing you can attach.
• Emoji terminate a tag. Accented letters and non-Latin scripts are fine, so #Fußball and #日本語 are real, working tags, but an emoji ends a tag at that point.
• Keep it typeable. A tag long enough to need reading twice is one nobody will type into a search box.

How many, and where they go

The count that works is nearly always well below the maximum the network allows.

• LinkedIn: three to five, at the end of the post.
• Instagram: the platform allows up to 30; the useful number is a fraction of that, in the caption or the first comment.
• X: one or two, worked into a sentence. Every character comes out of a 280-character budget.
• TikTok and YouTube Shorts: a handful in the caption, one of them naming the format rather than the topic.
• Mastodon, Bluesky and the smaller networks: tags carry more weight, because on several of them they are the main way a post is discovered.

Networks change these numbers and their own rules about them; the field's counter and the platform's current help page are the authority, not a table on a marketing site.

Where hashtags do nothing at all

They are a network feature, not a text feature. In an email subject line, a chat message, a document or the body of a web page, a hashtag is a word with a hash in front of it: not indexed, not searchable, not clickable. Search engines do not read them as tags either.

And the pattern that fails everywhere: the same 25 tags pasted under every post. It defeats the only thing a tag set is for, which is matching this post, and it is the most reliable way to look automated.