Don't Get Your Startup Shadowbanned: Avoid Posting Excessive Hashtags on These 3 Social Platforms
- DeJuan Wright
- Sep 1
- 3 min read
Marketing professors, well, at least the really great marketing professors, often emphasize to their students that every marketing action taken while building a brand will either help the brand—or hurt it.
That’s because regardless of how small a marketing move may seem, once it is presented to the public, their reaction towards it will either favor brand perception—or harm it.
Aside from a branding perspective, each marketing action that your startup takes will either be to its overall benefit—or its detriment.
Take the marketing actions your company may take on social media for example. If your startup’s social media marketing approach is like most companies, you've probably included hashtags in your company’s social media posts at some point, in hopes of helping increase visibility, organize content, and connect with communities.
Since the prevalence of social media, users have utilized hashtags in their posts to accomplish all of the aforementioned objectives. However, recently, social media platforms have taken great measures to crackdown on reducing spam and other bot-like behaviors.
Part of that crackdown has consisted of social media platforms penalizing accounts that excessively use hashtags in posts by shadowbanning them. Which essentially limits the reach that an account or a post has.
With these three popular platforms leading the charge.
For as much as some would lead you to believe that they're too demure to actively log on Instagram; the stats say otherwise. With well over 500 million daily active users, Instagram is easily one of the most popular platforms to ever exist.
In hopes of increasing reach on IG, brands often use hashtags in their posts in order to ensure that more accounts will come across their content.
Unfortunately, although many brands believe it’ll help attract more eyeballs towards their posts on the platform, posts that include excessive hashtags on Instagram (typically around 30 or more), will likely lead to the post or account being shadowbanned.
Which would obviously do more harm towards a brand's social media goals than help.
By far the most popular networking site amongst business professionals today, LinkedIn averages roughly 135 million users who log onto the platform daily to engage with other professionals, share their content, as well as consume content from other users.
To protect the professional image of the platform, LinkedIn is very strict with its approach towards users' use of hashtags.
LinkedIn’s algorithm primarily concentrates on the full context of a post, particularly the opening lines—rather than rewarding posts containing hashtags with a wider reach.
And although the use of hashtags still prove to be beneficial in some instances on the platform like helping to organize content—they do not contribute towards increasing the reach of a post.
X (Twitter)
The most-favored social media app for microblogging and receiving real-time updates for political news, sports stories, and all things hot in pop culture—X (formerly known as Twitter), attracts a wide array of posters with different purposes for visiting the platform.
With an estimated 250 daily active users, for years, X was known as the most monitored and filtered of the top five social media apps.
But if you’ve visited the X lately, you probably noticed the platform’s rules and policies have certainly become more lax since the days when Jack Dorsey was the company’s CEO. Nonetheless, one particular priority the platform’s current management has emphasized has been the reduction of spammy hashtag posts.
X penalizes posts containing more than two targeted hashtags by limiting the amount of exposure those posts receive.
Ready to take your startup’s social media game to the next level?
Contact us today and let’s begin the process of having Decryption create a custom social media strategy for your startup that’ll attract, entertain, inform, and engage your target customers.
Your startup’s ideal audience has been waiting for a company like yours to provide social media messaging that connects with them culturally. Become a Decryption client today and let's give them what they’ve been waiting for!
Comments