Oh no, what you wrote above is very different.
An IG influencer (by default an outside person) visiting the headquarters, potentially talking to staff, who might or might not know what they are talking about, making their own interpretation of it and then spreading it to 3rd parties (such as yourself) is NOT information coming from IG staff.
I’m not a lawyer but this would be called heresay evidence. Same as me saying a friend who’s mom goes out with the milkman who delivers milk next door to a Instagram coder watering his lawn said ‘ this or that’ …
We test here and test say, this is simply not true
I’ve heard the exact opposite from an influencer who has visited headquarters
Why would IG allow you to use 30 hashtags but limit your account if you use more than 5?
That would be a very dodgy more on their part and i highly doubt it.
It more inportant what hashtag you use and if it lands you on the explore page.
I’ve heard from a guy who knows a guy that your source was told the exact opposite of that guys statement from a friend of a friend who knows somebody at Google with contacts at Facebook in London, but he wasn’t sure if it was just a sarcastic comment. So there is 100% proof that more than 5 hashtags = permanent shadowban ghosted accounts.
I think you missed the fact that these are “influencers who went to the headquarters” who suggested this. It is one removed from Zuck telling you all of this.
Keep using the official limit (facts) instead of what has been shared by unknown 3rd party (opinions) at your own risk!
I think it is pretty clear that “hashtags are coming back in style”. Instagram spends a lot on R & D to develop new features, and quite a few of them recently have been about hashtags : the ability to follow hashtags, notifications about the number of posts one has liked recently which share a hashtag with a button to follow said hashtag, and the new explore feed which makes hashtags more prominent. Excessive use may well have been penalizing in the past (shadowbans, etc.) but it seems clear to me, without inside intel, that they can be used to our advantage which a proper strategy. I seem to have noticed an increase in organic discovery through hashtags since the last upgrade was rolled out on a couple accounts, though I can’t back this up with stats. Interested in you guy’s obversations, stress tests & thoughts!
If you are worried about hashtags you have bigger fish to fry
I do think that using THE SAME hashtags over and over can cause a problem.
However, for actual evidence, I can attest that using some (not 30) when you’re starting off can greatly increase your engagement. I have started a bunch of new accounts and include 10-20 hashtags per post and those do MUCH better than if I post without any hashtags. I rotate them quite a lot, so the variety factor I think does play a big role here.
I’ve only noticed that using 0 hashtags doesn’t work, engagement drops like crazy. 30 is business as usual, but I’m trying to experiment a lot nowadays, it wouldn’t surprise me if Instagram start penalizing hashtag abuse