How many hashtags should I use?

The hard limits and the useful numbers are different things. Instagram permits 30 hashtags per post, TikTok limits you by caption length rather than tag count, and YouTube will ignore all of your description hashtags if there are more than 15 of them — a rule people trip over constantly by pasting a tag list from an old video. Nowhere is the maximum the target. Instagram's own guidance has pointed at a small handful for years now, and every account we have moved from thirty tags to five has seen no drop in reach.

Here is the five we run on a typical twin-city business post, using an optician in I-8 Markaz as the example. One niche tag for what you sell. One format tag for what the post is, so the system knows a try-on clip from a price list. Two location tags — the city and the sector or market, because Islamabad and I-8 Markaz pull different crowds. One brand tag, which nobody searches but which becomes the archive of everything ever posted about you, including customer reposts.

Avoid the two extremes. Enormous tags with millions of posts are a lottery ticket; you are competing against accounts with a hundred times your engagement and you will never surface. Made-up tags with nine posts are dead ends. The band worth living in is a few thousand to a few hundred thousand posts, tightened by adding a city word — the difference between a generic eyewear tag and one that also says Islamabad is the difference between being seen by nobody and being seen by someone who can walk in on Saturday.

On YouTube, put one or two hashtags at the end of the description and stop. The first three appear above the title, which is the only place they are visible, and the old tags field has almost no weight left. Your title and your first two description lines are doing the actual work.