If you run a business and you’re on social media, someone at some point has told you that you need to be using hashtags. You’ve probably nodded along, typed a few in, and then wondered if any of it actually does anything. Fair question.
Here’s the short version: yes, hashtags work, but most businesses use them in ways that are either completely pointless or actively making their content look worse. Let me explain what they actually are and what you should be doing with them.
So what is a hashtag?
It’s the # symbol followed by a word or phrase with no spaces. #Melbourne. #SmallBusiness. #DigitalMarketing. When you tap on one, you see every public post that’s used the same tag. That’s it. Twitter (now X) popularised the whole idea back in 2007 when a user named Chris Messina proposed using the # symbol to group conversations, and it spread from there to basically every platform going.
The reason they matter for businesses is this: hashtags let people who’ve never heard of you find your posts. Without them, you’re essentially posting into a room full of your existing followers, and in the case of many small businsesses, that might not be very many. However, if oyu use the right hashtag, you’re opening a door to a much bigger room. Whether anyone walks through depends on what you’re posting, but at least the door’s open.
They don’t work the same way everywhere
Instagram is where hashtags carry the most weight. You can technically use up to 30 per post, though Instagram suggest keeping it to 3 to 5 well-chosen ones rather than plastering the caption with every vaguely related word you can think of. LinkedIn has warmed up to them considerably and a handful of relevant tags on a post there can genuinely lift your views, especially for anything industry-focused. Facebook, honestly, doesn’t care much either way. TikTok relies on them heavily for how it decides who to show your video to. And X is where the whole convention started, so they still matter there, particularly when something is trending.
The mistake most businesses make is treating all platforms the same, which is way too tempting given you can cross-post between Facebook and Instagram. What works on Instagram won’t necessarily do much on Facebook, and dumping the same caption with the same hashtags everywhere is a bit like wearing a flame-print Hawaiian shirt to a job interview. Technically, you’re dressed, wearing a collared shirt, but you’ve misread the room.
The bit where most businesses go wrong
Here’s what bad hashtag use looks like. Someone posts a photo of their café’s lunch special with #food and #coffee. Those tags have tens of millions of posts under them. You are invisible. These tags are global and refreshed by the second as users globally post photos of the hearts, tulipes or roses on their coffee foam at cafes around the world.
Nobody searching #food is finding your specific chicken schnitzel sandwich in South Melbourne. It might as well not be there.
The opposite problem is making up hashtags nobody searches for. #TheBestCafeInTheSouthernHemisphere or #OurNewMenuLaunch or whatever branded phrase sounds good to you internally. If nobody else is using or following that tag, you’ve created a hashtag with an audience of zero. If anything, if anyone does see your post and read your hashtags, they might think you need a better social media person.
What actually works is being specific without being so niche that you’re talking to yourself. A local café near the WebOracle office would do better with #SouthMelbourneCafe, #MelbourneBrunch or #MelbourneFoodie than either of those extremes. You want tags that real people are actually browsing, but not ones so flooded with content that your post disappears in seconds.
A decent approach is mixing a few local tags (suburb, city, region) with a few industry or topic ones, and occasionally a trending or event tag when something relevant is happening. If there’s a food festival on, use it. If it’s EOFY and you’re in a relevant industry, use it. Timeliness helps.
The stuff nobody tells you about Hashtagging
Beyond reach, there are a couple of ways businesses can use hashtags that most people don’t think about.
Branded hashtags are one. If you create a tag specific to your business and encourage customers to use it when they post photos of your product or experience, you end up with a self-generating collection of user content you didn’t have to produce yourself.
My boys came home from their childcare centre a few weeks ago covered in coloured powder because their childcare centre celebrates most major religious festivals from around the world, including Holi from India. If their childcare centre thought of it, they could have asked parents to take a photo of their kids afterwards with the hashtag #[ChildcareName]HoliFestival or similar, get parents sharing their kids’ messy clothes, and suddenly you’ve got community engagement that money can’t buy. The same logic applies to pretty much any business with customers who are even slightly enthusiastic about what you do. Whilst not the best example, as some people don’t like to post photos of their kids online, or necessarily reveal which childcare they go to, you could apply this logic to any local business in some way.
Now, you might be thinking, didn’t you just say not to make up hashtags that no one is looking for? That applies to your own posts. It’s different when asking for your customers to post something about you; that’s when it needs to be unique. It’s meant to amplify to their followers.
You can also use hashtags to listen rather than broadcast. Following tags relevant to your industry shows you what your potential customers are actually talking about, what problems they have, what your competitors are posting. It’s free market research that refreshes constantly.
What genuinely doesn’t work
Hashtagging every individual word in your caption. I’ve seen posts that look like #we #are #having #a #sale #this #weekend. That’s not a strategy; that’s really not doing anything useful at all and just looks silly.
Using completely irrelevant popular hashtags to try to sneak into a bigger conversation. Tagging #AFL on a photo of your office fit-out might get your post in front of footy fans, but footy fans aren’t shopping for office furniture on a Tuesday afternoon, and they will scroll straight past you. The platforms track this stuff. Low engagement from irrelevant audiences tells the algorithm your content isn’t worth showing to anyone, which makes everything worse.
And treating hashtags as a substitute for content worth posting. I’ve said it before about blogging, and it applies here too: an interesting post with no hashtags will always beat a boring post with perfect hashtags. They amplify what’s there; they don’t create it from nothing.
Hashtags are worth revisiting occasionally
Hashtag performance changes over time. A tag that was getting decent traction six months ago might be oversaturated now, or might have drifted toward a completely different type of content. It’s worth searching your regular tags every few months to check they’re still pulling the right crowd. If you search #Werribee (my hometown) and it’s mostly real estate listings, and you’re a food business, you might want to refine things a bit.
None of this is complicated once you understand what hashtags are actually doing. They’re a filing and discovery system, not magic. Use them to help the right people find you, not to make your caption look busy.
If you want help thinking through your digital marketing strategy properly, that’s something we do at WebOracle. Get in touch, and we can have a chat.