Hashtag Counter

Hashtag count limits and conventions vary by platform: Instagram caps at 30 (with diminishing returns past 5 to 10 by current research), Twitter/X has no hard cap but engagement drops past 2, LinkedIn recommends 3 to 5, TikTok favors 4 to 6 niche-specific tags over broad ones.

Paste post text and the counter extracts hashtags, returns the count, lists them, and flags duplicates. Use it to confirm you're within platform-recommended ranges before publishing.

The extraction logic is regex-based: match # followed by one or more letters, digits, or underscores. Hyphens, spaces, and most punctuation terminate the tag. Unicode-aware regex handles non-Latin hashtags (Chinese, Arabic, emoji) correctly. Duplicate detection compares case-insensitively because Instagram and most platforms treat #marketing and #Marketing as the same tag. The counter doesn't validate that tags exist or check for shadowban status — that requires platform-specific lookup against current banned-tag lists, which change frequently and aren't part of the basic count.

A worked example. Post text: 'New collection drop 🔥 #StreetStyle #streetstyle #fashion #ootd #fashionnova #ootdfashion #StyleInspo'. The counter finds 7 hashtags. Duplicate check: #StreetStyle and #streetstyle are the same — flagged. Effective unique tags: 6. Instagram research shows 5 to 10 well-targeted tags often outperform the maximum 30 because algorithm signals reward focus. The 6 unique tags here are all generic — #ootd alone has billions of posts. Niche tags (#streetwearberlin, #y2kfashionnova) typically reach engaged smaller audiences and stay discoverable longer than broad ones that get buried in seconds.

Limitations and platform-specific quirks. Each platform's algorithm treats hashtags differently. Instagram indexes both caption and first-comment hashtags identically, so the popular practice of dumping tags in the first comment is purely aesthetic. LinkedIn's algorithm penalizes posts with more than 5 hashtags as of late-2024 testing; engagement drops sharply past that threshold. TikTok favors a few niche-specific tags over broad trending ones; the platform's For You algorithm rewards content fit over hashtag count. Twitter/X engagement studies consistently show post engagement peaks at 1 to 2 hashtags and drops at 3+ — the platform was built around a non-hashtag follow graph, and hashtags read as less native there. Banned and shadowbanned hashtags are real on Instagram and TikTok; using them suppresses reach. Lists circulate online but aren't fully reliable. If your reach drops abruptly after a posting routine that previously worked, audit recent hashtags against current banned-tag databases.