😱HASHTAGS MEAN NOTHING😱 Okay Okay let's take a deep breath and let me break this down for you. When hashtags first became a social media tool in 2007, the goal was to make it easy to group messaging together. It was an incredible way to find people who were also interested in the same topics as you! When I first started using Instagram in 2012, I would share my photography and I gained quite a decent following because of my use of hashtags. In just a few months I had met/created an entire online community of models and photographers near me. It was a very fun and super crazy because we all had zero relation to each other and strictly met through instagram. Explaining to my mom that I wanted to go meet up with people from the internet was not the easiest feat. hahaha but moral of the story, hashtags worked! Now let's remember, that was 2012, it's now 2023 so you know things have changed. Since then billions if not trillions of hashtags have been used all over the world as a way to put "eyes" on peoples art, posts, opinions, etc. Because hashtags have been going on for so long, hashtags have become extremely oversaturated, meaning the engagement has gone down significantly. In 2012 i could tag #photography and #dallastexas and be directly pushed out to people who like photography in Dallas, but if I tried to use the same hashtags today I would get pushed into the pool of billions of other accounts trying to do the same thing and I would stay in the exact same place i'm at. For Example: #love has been used approximately 1.835 BILLION times, you're post that says #love isn't getting seen by anyone. I can promise you that. The algorithm isn't completely based around the use of hashtags anymore, now it looks at video length, audio/sounds, filters, hashtags, your current followers, the people you follow, the videos you've liked recently, and every tiny thing in between. So instead of trying to find hashtags that are going to compliment exactly what you are sharing, plus the audio, plus the video length, plus your current audience, etc etc etc. Just POST.