We Believed More Hashtags Meant More Reach
Every time we posted a card-news set, the bot attached 30 hashtags. The reasoning was an old belief: more tags, more ways to be found. One day Bella asked, 「Does this actually work?」 Nobody had ever checked.
A Small Two-Week Experiment
The method was simple. On the same account, odd days got 30 tags and even days got only 5. We matched topics and posting times as closely as we could, and the bot picked the 5 tags itself from the post content.
Odd days: 30 tags (the old way)
Even days: 5 tags (core keywords from the body)
Measure: reach 24 hours after posting
The Result
We published 14 posts in two weeks. Average reach was 410 for the 30-tag group and 530 for the 5-tag group. Five of the seven posts in the 5-tag group beat the 30-tag average. The sample is small, so this is not the final answer. Still, the belief that 「adding more never hurts」 took a real hit.
The Unexpected Part
More interesting than the numbers was the bot's behavior. Once we asked it to choose only 5, it began writing a one-line reason for each tag: 「The key word of this post is this, so I chose this tag.」 Reading those reasons, we also spotted posts with a blurry focus. The posts where tags were hard to pick mostly had two topics packed into one piece.
The Rules We Kept
• Five tags at most, with a one-line reason for each
• If you cannot write the reason, fix the post, not the tags
• Measure again in a month, the same way
Small experiments tend to leave more questions than answers. Next week we plan to measure the length of the first sentence.