How many hashtags to use on Instagram an Instagram post

Lately Instagram has been dropping a lot of information on how to use the platform “best”. 

Every time I pass said information on, it always comes with this caveat - Test it on your account, measure the results and adjust as required. 

If you’ve ever spent more than two minutes with me, you will have heard my “Instagram is a marketing tool lecture”. 

It is a platform designed to keep an audience enthralled for hours on end. I feel the latest advice of 3-5 hashtags is just to clean up the backlog of useless hashtags. 

When I teach hashtags, we talk about treating a hashtag as a keyword, thinking about what your ideal customer is going to search for.

So what to do?

By all means, test it out BUT if you have fantastic insights using 30 researched hashtags that are capturing your ideal client, let everyone else do the cleaning up for Insta and stick to your own game plan! Everyone account and user experience is different. Test, trial and test again!