Update to Reelyze

{
  "description": "Say how many hashtags to use on Instagram now that the platform caps them at five, with measured evidence of what creators actually do. Use when asked about hashtag counts, hashtag strategy, or whether more hashtags help reach.",
  "included_files": [],
  "name": "fix-reel-hashtags",
  "skill_md_contents": "---\nname: fix-reel-hashtags\ndescription: Say how many hashtags to use on Instagram now that the platform caps them at five, with measured evidence of what creators actually do. Use when asked about hashtag counts, hashtag strategy, or whether more hashtags help reach.\n---\n\n# How many hashtags, now that Instagram caps it at five\n\n**Use five, or fewer.** Instagram announced a five-hashtag limit on\n**2025-12-19**. Going over it does not get you more reach; it gets the excess\nignored and, by Instagram's own description, can suppress distribution.\n\nMost advice still in circulation says 20 or 30. That advice predates the cap.\n\n## What creators actually do now\n\nMeasured from 16,722 captions across 234 public creator accounts, derived\n**2026-09-07**.\n\n| | before the cap | since 2026-02 |\n|---|---:|---:|\n| captions over 5 hashtags | 59.9% | **5.2%** |\n| captions with exactly 5 | 7.3% | **51.4%** |\n\nCompliance landed in **February 2026**. Since then roughly half of all captions\ncarry exactly five hashtags, and five has become the default rather than a\nceiling people bump into.\n\nMost recent month on record, **2026-08**: 46.9% carry exactly five, 6.6% are\nstill over.\n\n## Quote the right figures\n\nThree traps, each of which flatters the story:\n\n- **Do not quote 57.8%** as the current exactly-five level. That is May 2026,\n  the single best month. The latest month is 46.9%.\n- **Do not quote 4.3%** as the pre-cap exactly-five baseline. That is the lowest\n  month in the pre-cap range, which runs 4.3% to 11.8%. The weighted six-month\n  baseline is **7.3%**.\n- **Do not state the current level from a single month** without saying which\n  month it is.\n\n## Why this is not just composition\n\nPre-cap rows are back-filled from accounts that connected later, so the two\nwindows do not hold the same accounts and the pooled change could be pure\ncomposition. Restricting to the **99 accounts that posted at least 3 times on\nboth sides** removes that confound, and the change survives at close to full\nstrength: over-limit captions fell from **48.3% to 6.5%**, mean hashtags from\n6.33 to 3.31.\n\nSay this if someone pushes back on whether the shift is real. It is the control\nthat decides it.\n\n## The floor, stated honestly\n\nCounts come from **captions only**. Hashtags placed in the first comment are\ninvisible to this measurement, so every count is a floor rather than an exact\nfigure. Caption truncation is not the cause: only 97 of the captions read ended\nin an ellipsis, 0.6%.\n\nThis dataset is 58.6% own-account posts and 82.1% own-account accounts, and\nthose two figures differ far more than they do in the follower-multiple\nbenchmark, so do not carry a composition figure across from one to the other.\n\n## What to say when asked for a strategy\n\nFive specific, relevant tags beat five broad ones, and beat thirty of anything.\nHashtags are also no longer the main distribution lever on reels: the hook and\nwatch time are. If someone is asking about hashtags because a reel\nunderperformed, the hashtags are probably not the reason, and `analyze-reel`\nwill say what was.\n"
}