A reader named Tom emailed us last month with a screenshot of a caption he'd almost posted for his hardware shop: thirty hashtags stacked at the bottom, a mix of #smallbusiness, #entrepreneur, #hustle and #instagood, none of which had anything to do with hardware, or his town. He'd read somewhere that more hashtags meant more reach. He was right about ten years ago. He's not right now.
Hashtags still work. They're one of the few remaining ways someone who has never heard of your business can find you through search or the explore page. But the old approach, pile on as many as the platform allows, stopped being effective once algorithms got better at reading relevance instead of counting tags. Here's what actually works in 2026.
How many hashtags you actually need
Three to five well-chosen hashtags now consistently outperform the maximum-allowed pile. According to Meta's own 2026 creator guidance, posts using a small number of highly relevant hashtags see better reach in the explore and search surfaces than posts stuffed with generic ones, because the platform reads a tight, relevant set as a stronger relevance signal than a scattergun approach.
The exception is Pinterest and X, where hashtags act more like simple search keywords and a slightly larger set of two to three specific phrases still helps. Instagram and Facebook reward precision. LinkedIn barely uses hashtags for discovery at all, three is already generous there.
The three-tier mix that actually gets you found
Instead of picking hashtags at random, build every set from three tiers. One broad tag with a large but relevant audience, like #smallbusiness or #localbusiness. One niche tag specific to what you actually do, like #handmadejewelry or #familyrunbusiness. One local tag tied to your town or neighbourhood, like #brightonshops or #austinsmallbusiness.
The broad tag gets you into a big pool where you'll rarely be seen. The niche tag gets you in front of people who actually want what you sell. The local tag is the one that converts, because someone searching #brightonshops is nearby and looking for exactly the kind of place you run. Most small businesses skip the local tag entirely and wonder why hashtags "don't work" for them.
How the rules shift by platform
Not every platform treats hashtags the same way, and using an Instagram approach everywhere leads to wasted effort. On Instagram and Facebook, three to five specific tags in the caption outperform a long list every time. On TikTok, hashtags function more like topic categories than search terms, two or three broad ones describing the type of content usually do more than niche tags. On Pinterest, treat hashtags like search keywords in a normal sentence, since Pinterest's own search engine relies heavily on descriptive text, and two to three specific phrases work best. On LinkedIn, skip hashtags almost entirely, one or two industry tags is already generous, since discovery there runs on your network and content quality far more than tags.
Keeping a short note of "how many, which platform" saves you from copying an Instagram-style hashtag block onto a LinkedIn post, which is one of the more obvious signs that a business is cross-posting without adapting the format.
Where to actually find good hashtags
Type a candidate hashtag into Instagram's search bar and look at the post count next to it. Under 10,000 posts, it's too small to matter. Over a few million, you'll be buried within minutes. The sweet spot for a local business is usually in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands, big enough to have an active audience, small enough that a good post can actually surface near the top for a while.
Then look at what similar local businesses near you are actually using, not big national brands with a completely different scale. Their comments and follower overlap will show you real, working local tags faster than any generic "best hashtags" list.
Let Frekto handle the hashtag research
Frekto reads your brand and suggests a relevant three-tier hashtag set with every post it generates, no more guessing which tags are actually worth using.
Try Frekto freeWhere to put them, and what to avoid
Put hashtags in the caption itself rather than the first comment. Instagram's 2025 update to its ranking system began weighing first-comment hashtags less heavily than in-caption ones, so the old trick of "hiding" tags in a comment now costs you reach rather than tidiness.
Avoid banned or flagged hashtags entirely, tags that have been overrun with spam or policy violations get quietly suppressed by the platform, and posting one can limit the reach of an otherwise good post. A quick search of the tag before you use it, checking that recent posts under it look legitimate, takes ten seconds and avoids the problem completely.
Keep a running list of your three-tier set per platform in your content calendar so you're not rebuilding it from scratch every time. Update it every couple of months, because post counts shift and today's sweet-spot tag can get crowded out or fall quiet.
Tom cut his hashtags from thirty generic ones to five specific ones, including his town's name. His next post reached more local accounts than any post he'd made in the previous six months. Fewer, better tags beat more, generic ones, every time.
Hashtags help people find a single post. Our guide on building a content calendar covers how to make sure there's something worth finding every week.
