The hidden impact of hashtags on Instagram: navigational heuristics on source trustworthiness

Hashtags are popular navigability tools in a social media-driven environment. However, social media users have purposely employed a hashtag stuffing strategy, where many unrelated hashtags are added to a post to increase the visibility of the post and drive viewership. The results of the current study suggest a potential negative impact of hashtags on source trustworthiness assessment made by Instagram users through heuristic processing. This research conducted two experimental studies with samples from the overall Instagram population. Study 1 (N = 174) was a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial experiment designed to demonstrate the positive effects of hashtags' navigability cues on Instagram users' perceived source trustworthiness. Study 2 (N = 185) was a 2 × 2 × 2 experiment that aimed to examine the interactive effect between the visual stimuli of a post and the heuristic cues of hashtags. The current research challenges some of the widely accepted hashtag strategies and provides several practical hashtag usage implications for social media influencers and companies.