The change - if permanent and pushed to all users - marks a significant change in the way the platform works. Historically, tags were used to discover content, and limiting tag usage places much more of an emphasis on refining choices based on relevance and importance.
Many businesses still rely heavily on using numerous hashtags to boost their reach, and others use them to paint a keyword picture or tag cloud. Limiting tags to just three makes any tag-related strategy far less effective, and far less reliable.
There are other ways of garnishing traffic - not the least of which is creating great content - but there will likely be a shift towards TikTok-style post content and transcript summaries. In a sense, and if the change becomes global, you will no longer discover content - you'll be *fed* content.
The focus will likely shift to contextual summaries and AI evaluations, meaning that Instagram will guide the feed more itself and lean on their algorithms to deliver content.
Three hashtags isn't enough. Make it five!
