Social Media Trends
Once a week, you’ll receive a short, concrete tip focused on how the trend affects your content strategy, what you should change, and how you can take action directly in our SMM tool.
All tips are gathered in this article:
Published: 01-20-2026
Instagram limits hashtags to 5 per post
Instagram now limits all posts to a maximum of 5 hashtags, which is a radical change from the previous cap of 30. At the same time, the platform has made it clear that hashtags are no longer the central mechanism for content discovery.
➤ Why this matters
Instagram is shifting toward AI-driven categorization, where the algorithm analyzes image, video, speech, text, and user behavior rather than manual tags.
Captions, keywords, and spoken content (for example, in Reels) are now important SEO elements.
➤ Recommended action
- Write SEO-optimized but natural captions.
- Use 4–5 extremely relevant keywords instead of broad hashtags.
- Include your primary search terms in both the caption and the spoken audio if it’s a video.
Did you know you can see your users’ most frequently used hashtags in Measure?
Read more about this here: https://retriever.productfruits.help/en/article/discussions