The Neon Sign Hashtag Test
Match hashtag, caption, and visual so discovery converts into engagement
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Star reframes hashtags away from magic-bullet thinking with a subway analogy. A hashtag is a neon sign you wear that attracts a particular kind of person to look at you. Your caption is the conversation you then have, and your photo is the visual. Discovery only converts when all three align. Wear a #NFLfootball sign and talk about nail polish, and you may pull attention but never the engagement you wanted — the sign lied. Wear the same sign, talk Super Bowl stats, and wear a Jets jersey, and every element checks out: discovered first, then engaged. The tactical layer follows from the mechanism. Prefer hashtags under roughly 500,000 posts because five-million-post tags are unwinnable. Build a mix of geographic, photo-related, topic, and industry tags matched to what is actually in the image, rather than pasting the same thirty tags every time.
Origin
Extracted from Young and Profiting
Core principles
- 01Hashtags are for discoverability, not engagement.
- 02Hashtags do not work for you; your content works for the hashtag.
- 03The wrong hashtag buys attention from people who will never engage.
- 04Alignment across sign, conversation, and visual is what converts a discovery into a follow.
- 05A smaller hashtag you can dominate beats a huge one you drown in.
How to run it
- 1
Stop asking which hashtags work
Reverse the question. Hashtags do not work for you; you decide which ones you want to work for, then earn them by serving them perfectly with your content.
Watch out Treating hashtags as a silver bullet — the diet pill that delivers a six-pack before summer — guarantees disappointment.
- 2
Run the neon sign check
Picture wearing the hashtag as a neon sign on a crowded subway. Ask whether the conversation you are having (the caption) and what you are wearing (the visual) match the sign.
Pro tip If a stranger drawn in by the sign would feel misled by the caption, the post fails the test before you publish.
- 3
Cap the size
Filter for hashtags with fewer than roughly 500,000 posts. Tags with five million posts make discovery drastically harder for a smaller account.
Watch out Big tags feel ambitious but bury you instantly.
- 4
Assemble the mix
Build the set from distinct categories: geographic or location-based, photo-related, topic, and where relevant industry hashtags — all pertinent to what is actually in the photo.
Pro tip The appropriate mix matched to the actual image is what Star calls the game changer.
Watch out Reusing the same 30 hashtags on every post becomes less and less effective, because the content stops being pertinent to the tags.
In the wild
Star sets up a crowded New York subway. Two people board wearing neon signs reading #NFLfootball. One sits down and talks Super Bowl stats while wearing a Jets jersey — sign, conversation, and visual all match, so a fellow fan engages. The other wears the same sign but talks about nail polish in a bright red dress and a fedora. That person may grab attention, but anyone browsing the NFL hashtag will not engage, because the sign promised one thing and delivered another.
→ Aligned posts convert discovery into engagement; mismatched ones attract attention that never converts.
Hala extends the mechanism to platform physics. Unrelated hashtags cast a wide net and pull in viewers with no interest in the subject. Those viewers see the post but do not engage, so engagement rate falls. The platform reads the low engagement as a signal the content is not worth showing and suppresses distribution further. The mismatch does not just fail to help — it actively damages the account.
→ Mismatched hashtags cause a self-reinforcing decline in reach.
Common mistakes
Recycling the same 30 hashtags
The set stops matching the content, so relevance collapses. The problem is not that the content is bad — it is that the content is not pertinent to the tags.
Expecting hashtags to drive engagement
Hashtags only handle discoverability. Engagement comes from the caption and visual delivering on what the hashtag promised.
Reaching for five-million-post hashtags
The bigger the tag, the harder it is to be discovered in it. Smaller, well-matched tags out-perform aspirational giant ones.
Is it for you?
Best for
Creators and business owners posting on hashtag-driven visual platforms who want discovery to convert.
Not ideal for
Platforms or accounts where discovery is driven by search and paid targeting rather than hashtags.
From the transcript
“hashtags are for discoverability not engagement”
“they don't work for you your content must be serving the hashtag perfectly”
“i like to describe hashtags as a neon sign that will attract particular people to look at your neon sign”
From the episode
Jasmine Star: Stand Out On Social
Jasmine Star