Remember the good old days when you could slap 47 hashtags on your TikTok and call it “strategic marketing”? Well, those days are over. TikTok has quietly introduced a five-hashtag limit, and honestly, it’s about time someone put us all on a hashtag diet.

If you’ve been hit with the new restriction popup, congratulations! You’ve just been personally told by TikTok that your #aesthetic #vibes #mood #content #creator #lifestyle #relatable #funny #trending #fyp #foryou #viral strategy might need some work.

The Death of Hashtag Spam (Finally)
Let’s be real for a second: we all know that person whose TikToks look like they fell face-first into a hashtag generator. You know the type, their captions are 30% actual content and 70% random tags, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with their video about making a sandwich.

Following the Cool Kids
TikTok isn’t pioneering this trend; it’s just catching up to what other platforms figured out ages ago. Instagram has been experimenting with hashtag limits, X removed them from ads entirely, and LinkedIn basically pretends hashtags don’t exist at all. Even Threads limits posts to a single hashtag. One! That’s social media minimalism taken to the extreme.

So what does this hashtag diet mean for your TikTok strategy? Instead of throwing spaghetti hashtags at the wall to see what sticks, you’ll need to rethink the five tags that best describe your content. 

You can read more here.