Do you follow a friend, colleague, blogger or celebrity that simply can´t get enough of hashtags and uses an insane amount every time they write something? If the answer is yes, that makes two of us.

Originally created by Twitter for categorization on social media, hashtags have expanded to other social networks such as Facebook and are now a feature your business (or you) must be using for your tweets/posts/comments to be truly effective and searchable. But we must ask, is there a certain amount we should be using? Does it impact our engagement?

I´m not saying no to hashtags, I´m just questioning the quantity and quality of them. Yes fine, our friends who are just trying to be funny are excused from this, but what about the others? Those who are (trying to) make a living out of the internet and just won´t stop with those hashtags? Well… as the graph below shows, overall less is more.

Whilst research on Twitter suggest that there is a 17% drop in engagement for those that tweet with more than two hashtags , in Instagram, the more the better.  Completely different to Facebook as the posts with no hashtags are the ones that perform the best.

So how do we know what to use where? A couple of suggestions:

• Look at your influencers, what are they doing? What are they using?
• Search around, are there any non-related hashtags you should be using?
• Analyze your data! What hashtags are attracting the most volume? What posts/tweets/comments are receiving the most engagement?
• Don´t put too many words in your hashtags #canyouevenreadthishashtag
• Don´t put too many hashtags. Visually it just looks awful!

In conclusion, try to optimize your hashtags, think rationally about what you post and just don´t overdo it! #ExcessLeadsToNoSuccess