It’s time to retire the hashtag
Once useful, the hashtag is increasingly irrelevant to reach on social media today. Plus, it’s really cringe
The debate over whether hashtags are useless today should have been put to rest when Instagram head Adam Mosseri told technology creator Marques Brownlee six months ago that hashtags did not improve visibility on the platform, but it looks like some people didn’t get the memo—including, embarrassingly, A.R. Rahman.
When the music maestro announced his divorce a week or so ago, his sombre post about things carrying “an unseen end” was accompanied, bizarrely, by a hashtag—“#arrsairaabreakup”, which became more of a talking point than the divorce itself. It may not have raised too many eyebrows a few years ago—decades in internet culture—when we were living in peak hashtag era, but it speaks to how irrelevant they are today that the internet’s immediate reaction to the post was to cringe unanimously.
Hashtags weren’t always frivolous—in the early days of social media, they served the purpose of categorising, organising and cross-referencing content. Technically, hashtags are a metadata tag, providing extra information or context about a piece of content. Back when the amount of social media content was not as insanely high as it is now and algorithms not as great at surfacing relevant stuff, they helped people jump into interesting conversations without having to perform cumbersome searches.
The creator of the hashtag is almost universally recognised to be American blogger Chris Messina, who proposed it in a tweet in 2007. They first became a thing on Twitter (never calling it X) and then rapidly spread to Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram—where they really found their vibe. On Twitter, they were mainly used to group together breaking news events and trending topics, but on Instagram, personalised hashtags like the Rahman one truly came into their own, with celebrity couple names and weddings making them cool and ‘aspirational’ for about five minutes.
Soon enough, everyone was overdoing it like crazy—without a word limit like on Twitter, it was normal to see Instagram posts accompanied by 50 hashtags; some relevant, most not; some mildly funny, most deeply unfunny.
That time is over. Experts in content and social marketing agree that its relevance to reach is minuscule today—especially on Instagram, where the money is. “Changes in social media algorithms and user behaviour have called into question the effectiveness of hashtags. These platforms have increasingly prioritised user engagement and content quality over hashtags,” says a post on For The Love of Socials, a Meta-certified boutique marketing agency based in Singapore. The company recently tested the impact of hashtags on various campaigns across platforms and found that there was “no significant difference in reach or engagement between posts with hashtags and those without.” “Hashtags aren’t dead, but their role in expanding reach in 2024 is not what it used to be,” the report concluded.
Well, the head of Instagram already said so. The truth is, AI-based algorithms have become scarily good at getting you exactly the kind of content you are seeking, and hashtags have become digital dinosaurs; the meaningless detritus of a simpler time on the internet.
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First Published:10 Dec 2024, 09:00 AM IST
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