Hashtags are a dying breed: What marketers need to know in 2025

For over a decade, hashtags were synonymous with social media visibility. From grassroots activism to branded campaigns, the pound sign was a shortcut to virality, discoverability, and community building. But in 2025, hashtags no longer carry the cultural or algorithmic weight they once did. Platforms have reoriented around AI-driven recommendations, and for marketers, the implications are significant.

The decline of the hashtag era

In the early 2010s, hashtags were the connective tissue of online culture. Movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo demonstrated their power to unify voices, mobilise communities, and even influence politics. Brands followed suit, leaning on campaign tags like Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke or Dove’s #LikeAGirl to spark participation, create shareable moments, and track engagement.

Over the past decade, however, the mechanics of discovery shifted. Twitter’s transition into X placed interest-based feeds and algorithmic curation ahead of chronological or hashtag-driven discovery. TikTok rose to dominance without hashtags as a central mechanism, relying instead on behavioural signals – watch time, replays, shares – to determine what content gains traction. Even Instagram’s own leadership has acknowledged that hashtags are a “secondary signal” at best for its recommendation engines.

As a result, hashtags have lost their role as a driver of reach. Today they function more as a categorisation or labelling tool, useful for indexing but increasingly irrelevant to how people actually discover content. Discovery itself has moved upstream. With Instagram content now fully indexed on Google, the platform has formally entered the search ecosystem – opening new opportunities for marketers to achieve long-term visibility, organic discoverability, and measurable SEO impact.

So where do other social platforms stand?

Hashtags by platform

• TikTok: Discovery is almost entirely algorithm-driven, with watch time, replays, and shares determining reach. Hashtags play only a minor, decorative role and have recently been limited to 5 per post.
• Instagram: Hashtags function more as labels for categorisation, while consistent engagement signals like saves and shares are far more influential for visibility.
• LinkedIn: Tags still help with topic indexing and professional discoverability, but the algorithm prioritises dwell time and conversational depth.
• X (formerly Twitter): Once the birthplace of hashtag culture, it now emphasises algorithmic “For You” feeds and interests, reducing hashtags to a supporting role.
• Facebook: Introduced hashtags in 2013, but their impact has remained minimal. Distribution is driven instead by groups, friends, and algorithmic recommendations.

Have algorithms replaced the pound sign?

What hashtags once offered – content classification and trend aggregation – algorithms now deliver more effectively. AI-powered recommendation systems analyse text, visuals, audio, and even user interactions to determine relevance. TikTok’s For You Page has set the industry standard: personalised feeds that anticipate interests without requiring explicit input from users.

Instagram and X have followed suit, prioritising behavioural data over tagged metadata. Even LinkedIn, where hashtags still play a role in search visibility, is increasingly driven by engagement metrics like comments and dwell time. The algorithms simply know enough to serve content without needing a user to attach a string of keywords.

So the answer is yes – for the most part, but not completely.

While the glory days of hashtags are behind us, they haven’t disappeared entirely. Their functions have narrowed:

• Community organising: Niche groups and grassroots movements still use hashtags to create visibility around causes or local events.
• Event aggregation: Conferences and live events often rely on hashtags to consolidate conversation in real time.
• Professional visibility: On LinkedIn, hashtags remain relevant for topic tagging and SEO-style discoverability.

But these are limited, utility-driven roles – far from the cultural centrality hashtags once enjoyed with #throwbackthursday, #like4like or #YOLO being regular sightings on ones socials.

Lessons for marketers

For brand strategists and CMOs, the decline of hashtags should not be read as the loss of a tool but as a reallocation of attention. The real drivers of content discovery now lie elsewhere:

1. Prioritise storytelling over tagging. Creative execution, not a hashtag, determines whether content travels. Brands like Duolingo and Ryanair on TikTok exemplify how personality-driven, story-rich posts gain traction without campaign tags.
2. Create strong visual narratives. HQ visuals capture attention, recurring visual narratives sustain recognition. Together, they send the strongest possible engagement signals to algorithms.
3. Lean into algorithms. Understand what signals matter to each platform: watch time on TikTok, saves and shares on Instagram, dwell time on LinkedIn. Optimising for these behaviours is more impactful than optimising for hashtags.
4. Build in closed ecosystems. Increasingly, communities are moving to private or semi-private spaces like WhatsApp channels, Discord servers, or Telegram groups – environments where hashtags are irrelevant.
5. Use hashtags strategically, not habitually. For live events, professional indexing, or activism campaigns, they still serve a role. But as a catch-all growth tactic, they no longer deliver.

The cultural reframing

The hashtag symbol # may live on our keyboards, but it has lost its symbolic force as the signifier of online relevance. The cultural momentum has shifted towards platform-native discovery, where creators and brands succeed by aligning with narrative trends, leveraging algorithmic cues, and fostering direct community ties.

In other words: hashtags are no longer the bridge between creators and audiences. The platforms themselves have become that bridge. For marketers, success now comes from mastering the currents of algorithmic distribution through strong storytelling and clear visual narratives, rather than clinging to a fading icon of digital culture.