Hashtag Marketing: Still Useful in 2025?

Let’s talk hashtag marketing and whether or not it’s still a thing.

Love them or loathe them, you can’t deny the power of the humble hashtag over the last decade. Remember #FollowFriday on Twitter? Or the #ShareaCoke campaign from Coca-Cola way back in 2011, which garnered 25 million new Facebook followers, more than 18,000,000 media impressions and increased their sales by a whopping 7%. All in 12 months. From one hashtag.

Hashtags have been the staple of social media marketing over the years because they’ve offered brands a simple way to increase visibility, supercharge engagement, join trending conversations and amplify reach.

But with Elon Musk declaring on X/Twitter last month that users should stop using hashtags as they’re no longer useful and look ugly, has the humble hashtag now lost its relevance? Or are hashtags still a useful marketing tool to have knocking around the marketing toolbox in 2025?

Hashtags explained

Quite simply, they’re keywords or key phrases preceded by a # sign. And they’re a way to categorise your social media content to make it easier to find.

How do you write a hashtag?

Formatting: Hashtags always start with a # but they won’t work if you use spaces, punctuation marks or other symbols. In other words, #don’t do this!

Title casing: Hashtags aren’t case sensitive, but capitalising each word makes them easier to read. Think #ThisIsAHashtag versus #thisisahashtag. And it could also save you from an embarrassing hashtag fail. Like this: #susanalbumparty

Unique: Hashtags should be unique. Don’t use a branded or campaign hashtag without running it through a hashtag tracker like brandmentions. Butting heads with another brand by jacking their hashtag won’t do your reputation any favours.

So how did hashtags come about? In 2007, product designer Chris Messina approached the then newly launched Twitter with his idea of using hashtags to ‘group related tweets’. ‘These things are for nerds’ and he was told ‘they’re never going to catch on.’ Ha! #FamousLastWords.

Since then, hashtags have gone on to be adopted by millions. And when you use a hashtag in a post, it gets grouped with all the posts that are also using that hashtag, and becomes a clickable, searchable link. This simple filtering system helps social media users find content they’re interested in and it gets new eyeballs on your posts. Consequently, hashtags have been used to drive trends, spark global discussions, and launch social movements.

To hashtag or not to hashtag?

But if you’ve been paying attention to digital marketing trends, you’ll know that the humble hashtag is a topic of ongoing debate. Once the darlings of discoverability on social media, some – including Musk – consider them ‘outdated relics of a bygone internet era’, and completely redundant. While hashtag enthusiasts still consider them a useful tool for every social media marketer and believe they still hold significant value in the digital landscape.

So what’s happened to hashtags?

Like all things in the social media universe, hashtags and hashtag marketing have evolved over the years. But their declining effectiveness can be put down to two things: oversaturation and algorithm changes.

In a nutshell, hashtags have been a victim of their own success.

Their effectiveness has been significantly reduced thanks to their overuse, with spam accounts and bots flooding irrelevant and low-quality content with popular hashtags in order to gain visibility. This has led to users becoming weary of excessive hashtags in captions and regarding them as inauthentic and spammy.

Secondly, social media platforms are continuously evolving and updating their algorithms to become more sophisticated and enhance the user experience. Posts overloaded with excessive hashtags are now flagged as spam, and there’s now more emphasis on content relevance and engagement. As a result, the importance of hashtags has shifted downwards and having a hashtag strategy is no longer the ‘make-or-break element of your social media management’.

Good old search engine optimisation (SEO) has replaced hashtags when it comes to finding content. And there are social media platforms like TikTok which is operating more like a traditional search engine. In fact when it comes to 18-24 year olds, more of them use TikTok for search rather than Google.

What are the platforms saying about hashtags?

As I’ve mentioned, hashtags are becoming less relevant for post discovery, thanks to better platform technology. But what are the platforms themselves saying about it?

Instagram hashtags

Back in May last year, Instagram’s head honcho Adam Mosseri said that hashtags can help people with specific interests to find certain communities, but the overall impact on post visibility is minimal. Then last month Instagram announced that it had removed the option to follow hashtags and that posts from followed hashtags will no longer appear automatically in Instagram users’ feeds.

Instead, Instagram has shifted to AI-driven recommendations, so the more you engage with a certain type of content (through likes and comments) the more you’ll see that type of content. In other words, there’s now more emphasis on engagement and content quality rather than hashtags.

So is hashtag marketing on Instagram now dead? Not quite. Social media marketer Jodine McIntyre at Social Smarty says she’s still sitting on the fence about hashtag use. Whether they’re useful or not ‘really does depend on your goals, the size of your account, your time [and] your resources’.

LinkedIn hashtags

As recently as last year, LinkedIn would make hashtag suggestions at the end of a post. For instance, for my PR Superstar posts, the hashtags #PR #PublicRelations or #MediaRelations would often be suggested as I was drafting the post. That’s all gone now. In February 2024, LinkedIn removed the creator mode on its platform and phased hashtags out.

If you do use hashtags – and I suggest two or three at the most – it won’t hurt your post. But, these days, on LinkedIn you’re better of focussing on ‘strong, relevant keywords’ and high quality content rather than relying on hashtags to boost the visibility of your post.

X (Twitter) hashtags

Although X (Twitter) was one of the first platforms to use hashtags, Musk has advised that their use is officially over.

But I think this one will be a hard habit to break. According to SEO Expert Matthew Woodward, the stats speak for themselves with posts on X with one or two hashtags getting double the engagement of posts without, and also securing a whopping 55% increase in reposts. But beware. My advice is only use one or two carefully crafted hashtags that are super relevant to your campaign, and that’s it. As Woodward points out, posts with more than two hashtags experience less engagement.

Facebook hashtags

Facebook was one of the last platforms to adopt hashtags and they’re still very much in use. Over at the social media management platform radar.io, they think that Facebook hashtags can ‘build brand awareness, as consistently using specific brand-related hashtags can create a recognisable track for your audience to follow’. But also point out that they can make your posts look spammy.

Their advice – and mine too – is to use hashtags ‘thoughtfully and sparingly’, using only one to three carefully crafted hashtags. However, their ongoing success will depend on how Facebook integrates them with ‘cutting-edge technologies like AI and augmented reality experiences’. Watch this space.

YouTube hashtags

Hashtags are still used all over YouTube and can be found in the video’s title and inside the description box. What’s probably most useful about YouTube hashtags is they help your visitors understand your video content quickly and easily. And hashtags are a useful way to tie your videos together without the use of playlists. As per the other platforms, hashtags can help visitors to find similar content. But they can do that anyway just by using a keyword. There’s a reason YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google.

My advice is, if you’re going to use hashtags, keep them to three to four, as overtagging looks spammy and YouTube will ignore them all. Don’t be tempted to jump on to a trending hashtag and include it in your video description either. Instead, ensure that every hashtag used is specifically related to your video.

Conclusion: Hashtags are still useful but aren’t as important as they were

Hashtags marketing isn’t dead yet. But hashtags are losing their relevance and can no longer be relied on to attract visitors to your post. Instead:

• Focus on creating compelling, high-quality posts that provide value to your audience.
• Craft detailed captions and incorporate relevant keywords and key phrases into your post.

If you do use hashtags:

• Use them for specific awareness days or industry events, or campaign tracking.
• Or to find and build niche communities.
• Avoid hashtags that repeat words or phrases that are already in the post.
• Do not stuff posts with dozens of generic hashtags.
• Instead use two or three carefully crafted industry specific hashtags.

With social media platforms becoming more like search engines, and with algorithms now able to better recognise a user’s interests and intent, 2025 is the year social media marketers need to adapt their hashtag marketing strategy. So dial down the hashtags, ramp up relevant keywords and ensure your target audience can find you.

#HappyHashtagging