Goodbye to Hashtags

Chat, how are we doing one week after Elon announced the end of hashtags on X advertising? Is everyone okay? Were your ads halted? Did you even know hashtags were going away?

The truth is they’ve been gone a long time. At this point most major social media platforms place little to no feed priority on hashtags.

What does this mean for us, the marketers? First off, let’s quietly celebrate. Hashtags were tacky. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we have an opportunity to take stock of our strategy by platform.

Platforms like TikTok, X and Instagram utilize primary ranking factors like user activity (likes, shares, reposts) and interaction history. YouTube factors watch history and video performance. LinkedIn values post quality (readability, encourages responses) and early engagement. 

The core idea of categorizing relevance previously achieved through hashtags is still incredibly helpful. Now we can focus on making organic and paid content copy relevant and engaging to target audiences. The rise of AI has allowed platforms to more effectively discover and assign relevance in copy and images for user feeds without hashtags. Think of hashtags you would have included, and instead consider working them in as keywords within your copy or included in your images.

I feel like a broken record these days, but once again the only constant is change. Not to leave you empty-handed, below is an at-a-glance reference of platform-specific nuances regarding hashtag effectiveness.

Stay nimble, my friends.

Platform	Algorithmic Priority for Hashtags	Search & Discoverability Impact	Primary Discovery Mechanism
X	Low; Categorization only	Moderate for searchability/trends	AI-driven content interpretation, engagement
Instagram	Low; Categorization only	Limited; SEO captions prioritized	AI-driven content understanding, engagement (saves, shares, watch time), keywords in captions
LinkedIn	Negligible	Limited; Keywords prioritized	SEO-driven content, natural language keywords, meaningful engagement
Facebook	Negligible	Limited; Niche/event marketing	Keywords, meaningful interactions, community engagement
Pinterest	Not Recommended	Negligible; Can appear spammy	High-quality images, keyword-rich descriptions, engaging titles
Threads	Negligible	Limited; Searchable	User control, author's Instagram profile, post performance, algorithm trending topics
YouTube	Negligible	Limited; Keywords prioritized	AI analysis of visual/spoken words, keywords in descriptions/titles, watch time