Earlier this week, The Design Twins published a blog about the hashtag games. You can read it here. Honestly, I was a bit relieved when I read it. I’ve had a love/hate with hosting hashtags for awhile now (did I really admit that out loud?). I’ve expressed my frustrations over hashtag games over the last month or so on my IG stories, but I hesitated on doing anything because the games have become everything to the IG home decor community. It’s really why there is some sense of community, right? There really is love in my heart for them. And I absolutely adore the people I host my hashtags with. The thought of giving them up made me sad, but…it had begun to feel like work. IG has made several changes over the last couple of months (like removing the option to DM a post) that has made hosting a hashtag much more time consuming.

When The Design Twins suggested that posting the hashtag announcements on your feed can actually hurt the engagement on every single original piece you put out there, everything began to make sense. My engagement has tanked over the last couple of weeks. I know many of you have noticed and have been hurt by it too. When you post a hashtag announcement (with those big words that are actually helpful to anyone that’s trying to play your hashtag), people scroll right past. I scroll right past. You don’t get many likes. You don’t get many comments…if any. IG sees it as people don’t really pay much attention to your posts. So when you actually share one of your posts, IG doesn’t broadcast it to as many people.

This past week we moved our hashtag #mydecorwednesday to our stories. Like all of it. We shared a pic in our stories inviting people to play along. We are each going to share our favorite in our stories (that’s right…no more trying to vote around everyone’s busy schedules!!). Not a single aspect of it made it to our feed. It has been so simple, so easy, so stress-free.

What Did I Learn?

1. We had the same amount of participation as normal. Probably because we’ve been around for seven months and people just automatically tag their pics with it. I suspect that participation may drop as time goes on, but I’m okay with that.
2. My feed looks like MY feed again. When someone stops by my page, they see my stuff, without pics that have words on them. An IG friend mentioned to me that a real life friend asked her why she had so many pics on her feed that weren’t even of her house. Ouch. But that’s the world we had begun to create on IG. We had to share so many hashtag game posts, we barely had time to worry about posting our own stuff.
3. I’ve been inspired to share MY stuff again. Three days a week (more if I had the honor of guest hosting), I was posting a hashtag announcement. I rarely shared pics of my own home on those days. I got lazy. I figured, “Well, my name’s out there today on that post, why post something else?”. This week, I’ve been more inspired to stage pics and have shared a new pic almost every day. IG has begun to feel like a creative place again.

How do people know who the hosts are to follow? The truth on this one is that there are so many hashtags going on now, it’s nearly impossible to try to follow all the hosts. It would take an hour for me to find the hashtags going on for that day, search each hashtag, follow those hosts. Believe me, I’ve tried to do it before. We decided to not require people to follow all hosts. But if that’s really important to you, you could try tagging each host on your announcement pic in your stories.

But, I think we need to realize hashtags are no longer a way to gain followers. Instead, we need to view it as a sense of community and a way to discover and build up other feeds. 

But I’m a new account, if I don’t host a hashtag, how do I get followers? This is a tough one because hosting a hashtag was at the top of the list on the “how to’s” of starting out. It’s easy to say “stop the hashtags” when you have 100,000 followers, or even 10,000. So I really am sympathetic to the blow this is. But you don’t want to spend a whole bunch of time on something that isn’t really going to help that much, really. Share your very best photos. Use the hashtags. Go out and comment on other’s people’s pics (it’s the best free advertisement you can get). Hey, did I mention you should go out and comment on other people’s pics? 😉

Can I still play the hashtag games? Of course! Using the hashtags will not damage your engagement.

At first, I was so angry at IG for making these changes. “Why do they want to go and mess up our home decor community?” I vented several times in my stories. But over the last few days, I realized that there are SO many hashtag and giveaway announcements and not very much original work. That’s not what our community should look like. Imagine that you’re just someone that wants to be inspired by pretty homes. Do you really want to follow someone that has a whole bunch of pics (that aren’t their own) with large letters posted on them?

If you have a question or thought that I haven’t brought up or considered, please share! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this hot topic.