I’ll admit it: I used to be a hashtag maximalist. Every LinkedIn post got the full treatment—#B2BMarketing #Innovation #Leadership #Growth #DigitalTransformation—you name it. I figured more hashtags meant more visibility, right?

Wrong. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one living in this delusion.

The Hashtag Zombie Walk

Walk through LinkedIn or Facebook feeds today and you’ll see the same zombie behavior everywhere. Posts ending with strings of hashtags that feel more like keyword stuffing than actual communication. We’re all doing it because… well, because everyone else is doing it.

But here’s the question that’s been bugging me: when was the last time you actually clicked on a hashtag? When did you last discover something interesting by browsing #Leadership or #Innovation?

If you’re like most people, the answer is probably “Never.”

LinkedIn: The Last Hashtag Haven (Sort Of)

Don’t get me wrong—hashtags aren’t completely useless on LinkedIn. They do help the algorithm figure out what your post is about, and some people genuinely follow hashtags to find content in their feeds.

But here’s what I’ve learned from watching my own analytics and talking to other marketers: hashtags aren’t the discovery engine we pretend they are. The LinkedIn algorithm cares way more about whether people actually engage with your content than whether you’ve tagged it properly.

I’ve experimented with this. Posts with thoughtful, targeted hashtags (maybe three or four max) perform about the same as posts with zero hashtags—as long as the content itself is solid. Over-hash your posts, though, and you start looking like a spam bot.

The sweet spot seems to be mixing one broad hashtag (like #Marketing) with a couple more specific ones (#ABMStrategy). But honestly? Your headline and first sentence matter way more than whatever tags you slap at the end.

Facebook: Where Hashtags Go to Die

Facebook hashtags are basically digital tumbleweeds at this point. I know marketers who still use them religiously, but I’ve never met a single person who browses Facebook by clicking hashtags.

The only time they make sense is for campaign tracking or when you’re trying to get people to use a specific branded hashtag for an event. Otherwise, you’re just adding clutter that makes your posts look like they were written by a social media intern in 2012.

Where Hashtags Actually Work

You know where hashtags still matter? TikTok. Instagram (sometimes). And in SEO contexts where they function more like actual search terms.

On TikTok, hashtags are the entire discovery mechanism. People actively search for them, trends are built around them, and the algorithm uses them heavily to serve content. Same with Instagram to a lesser degree.

But B2B marketers mostly aren’t on TikTok (yet), and when we are, we’re usually too scared to be authentic enough to make it work anyway.

The Real Problem

The disconnect is this: we’re optimizing for what we think algorithms want instead of what actual humans do. While we’re busy crafting the perfect hashtag strategy, our audience is scrolling past our carefully tagged posts because the content itself isn’t compelling enough to stop for.

I started paying attention to my own behavior, and I realized something embarrassing: I almost never discover content through hashtags, but I was still using them constantly in my own posts. I was performing hashtag theater for an audience that didn’t exist.

What Actually Works

After months of testing and way too much time spent analyzing post performance, here’s what I’ve settled on:

For LinkedIn: Three to five hashtags maximum. One broad, a couple specific, and only if they feel natural to the post. I write the post first, then ask if hashtags would actually help someone find it.

For Facebook: I’ve mostly stopped using them unless I’m running a specific campaign. My engagement didn’t drop. Nobody noticed.

For everything else: I focus on writing headlines and opening lines that make people want to read more. Turns out that matters way more than any hashtag strategy.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Maybe the real issue isn’t whether hashtags work—it’s that we’ve been using them as a crutch to avoid doing the harder work of creating content people actually want to engage with.

It’s easier to blame poor performance on hashtag strategy than to admit our posts might be boring. It’s more comfortable to follow hashtag best practices than to figure out what our audience genuinely cares about.

So here’s my challenge: try posting without hashtags for a week. Focus entirely on making your content so compelling that people can’t scroll past it. See what happens to your engagement.

I bet you’ll discover what I did: the hashtags were never the point. The conversation was.

And if nobody’s joining the conversation, maybe we really are just talking to ourselves.