When they first came onto the scene they were a great way to find related people to follow who created certain types of content I enjoy.

Once everyone’s on a social network, and once I find the group i want to follow,  I don’t need hashtags much.

This often happens with social networks as they get established. Our timeline gets interesting enough that we stop branching out into the search & discover tabs to find new people to follow.

The people and brands I follow are pretty well integrated into a cohesive “show” that I like. Every once in a while (like when I want more yoga inspo or more fashion inspo) I will go in and tweak that network a bit.

Hashtags were supposed to be there to help me grow my interests, but now hashtags are a mess of bots and marketers.

I want to be discoverable, but I also don’t want to be spam-commented by a handful of bots every time I use a hashtag in my niche.

It’s a monster born at the hands of marketers.

If you think you need more followers at the hands of bots, think again. Sure everyone wants to grow. When I heard a social marketing agency CEO say they had to use them because “everyone did it” and “clients want to see growth” –it sank me.

Our obsession with growth and having the most followers is insane. More followers won’t make you successful. More engaged fans (even if far fewer in number) will.

I would rather have 50 engaged followers over 5,000 that weren’t.