Hashtags and location tags for guides

On 20 January 2025 the body of water that most of America's saltwater guides work on was given a different official name, and on 6 June the change had worked its way into the rules governing the outer continental shelf.

Nothing about the water changed. What changed was the name printed in the federal register of geographic names, and everything downstream of it. The subpart of the fishing regulations covering reef fish now carries the new name in its own heading. That single sequence is the whole argument of this page: a location tag is a naming decision, names are standardised by a federal body that has been doing it since 1890, and the platform's place record has no obligation to agree with any of it. Which name you type is therefore a choice, and it is worth making deliberately. The neighbouring channel work is indexed on the getting-booked hub.

Why is a location tag a naming decision?

Because tagging a place means choosing one name for it out of several that exist.

A stretch of water usually carries a formal name, a local name, an older name, a name the tourism board prefers and a name the fish camp down the road uses.

The tag on a post picks one of them and attaches the post to a record built around that choice.

Most guides make the choice by accident, by taking whichever suggestion the application offers first.

That suggestion is generated from a place database maintained by a private company, and it reflects whatever that company's records say today.

It is not the official name, it is not necessarily the local name, and it has no obligation to be either.

Understanding which of the three you are picking is the difference between a tag that puts a post in front of the right people and one that files it under a name nobody uses.

The broader question of what the account is for sits with the Instagram strategy piece.

24/7 Sportfishing, FL

Who decides what a place is called?

A federal board created in 1890, which standardises rather than regulates.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names describes itself as a federal body created in 1890 and established in its present form by public law in 1947, existing to maintain uniform geographic name usage throughout the federal government.

It comprises representatives of federal agencies concerned with geographic information, population, ecology and the management of public lands.

Its own account of its history contains a phrase worth the whole page: it describes the usefulness of standardising, not regulating, geographic names.

That parenthesis is the operative fact for anybody choosing a tag, because it means no private party is obliged to use the official name for anything.

The board also states that any person or organisation, public or private, may ask it to render formal decisions on proposed new names, name changes, or names that are in conflict.

Which is to say the register is open to petition, and the names in it are the result of a process rather than a fact of nature.

The board publishes this account on the USGS site.

What does the statute actually say?

One sentence, and it binds the government rather than the public.

The board was recreated by Congress in 1947 and codified at 43 U.S.C. 364.

The section provides that the Secretary of the Interior, conjointly with the Board on Geographic Names, shall provide for uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography throughout the federal government.

The source credit runs to an act of 25 July 1947, chapter 330, section 1, at 61 Stat. 456.

Read the object of that sentence carefully: uniformity throughout the federal government, not throughout the country.

Nothing in it reaches a fishing guide, a map application or a social platform, and nothing in it requires anybody outside the executive branch to change a word.

That is why a guide can write the local name on a post and the federal name on a permit application in the same afternoon without either being wrong.

The text is published on the Office of the Law Revision Counsel site.

What happened in 2025?

An executive order changed the register, and the register changed the rules.

Executive Order 14172, signed 20 January 2025 and published at 90 FR 8629 on 31 January, directed the Secretary of the Interior to rename the U.S. continental shelf area bounded by Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba, as the Gulf of America.

It directed the Secretary to update the Geographic Names Information System accordingly and to remove references to the former name from that system, consistent with applicable law.

The same order reinstated the name Mount McKinley while leaving the surrounding national park area named Denali National Park and Preserve, which is a useful illustration that a feature and the area around it can carry different official names at the same time.

It also directed the board to provide guidance so federal references, including agency maps, contracts and other documents, would reflect the renaming.

Whatever anybody thinks about the decision, the operational fact for a guide is simple: the official name of the water changed on a specific date, by a documented process, and the change was published.

The order is published in full by the Federal Register.

How far does a name change travel?

Into the rulebooks, within months, with a paper trail at every step.

On 6 June 2025 the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management published a final rule at 90 FR 24066 amending its regulations under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, revising language reading Gulf of Mexico, and the associated acronym, to read Gulf of America.

Its abstract states plainly that the executive order directs agencies to make the change and that the rule ensures the regulations comply.

On 15 January 2026 a further rule at 91 FR 1707 made the same substitution in the regulations governing Seamen's Service Awards.

Pull the reef fish regulations today and the subpart heading reads Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of America, which is the same rename arriving in the text a saltwater operation actually has to read.

Each of those is a separate document, published separately, and the propagation took months rather than days.

The lesson for a tag is that federal text updates on a schedule and platform place records update on no schedule at all.

How the same regulatory calendar can drive a posting plan is worked out in the content calendar piece.

Does the platform's place record follow?

It has no obligation to, and that is the practical problem.

A location tag attaches a post to a record inside a private database, and nothing in 43 U.S.C. 364 reaches that database.

The result is that a single stretch of water can exist as several separate tags, each with its own history of posts, and each collecting a different slice of the audience.

Duplicate place records are common, and a guide who tags a different one each week is spreading their own posts across three or four archives.

None of that is visible from inside the posting interface, which shows the tag as a single tidy suggestion.

The only way to see it is to search the place name inside the application and count how many records come back for the same water.

Pick one, write it down, and use that one every time, which costs nothing and consolidates everything you have posted.

The equivalent problem on the map side is handled by the map pack piece.

So which name do you write?

The one a client would type, with the official one alongside it once.

A tag exists to be found, and the people doing the finding are anglers rather than cartographers.

They type the name they have heard, which is usually the local one and occasionally an old one that nobody official has used in forty years.

So the caption carries the name people say, and the tag attaches to the place record that already has the most posts on it, because that is where the searching happens.

Where the official name earns its place is on the website rather than the post, because a page that names the water formally is legible to somebody unfamiliar with the area.

Writing both, once, in the same paragraph, is how a page catches the person searching either.

That costs one sentence and resolves the whole tension between the register and the vernacular.

Building those pages properly is the subject of the water and city pages piece.

Come and Take It Saltwater Adventures, TX

What are hashtags actually for?

Filing, not distribution, and the difference decides how many you use.

The useful mental model is that a hashtag files a post into a topic rather than pushing it to anybody.

Somebody has to go looking in that topic for the filing to matter, which is a much smaller behaviour than the advice implies.

The people who go looking in a fishing topic are mostly other anglers, other guides and people planning a trip somewhere specific.

The third group is the one worth catching, and they search a place plus a species rather than a general fishing term.

Which means a small set of specific tags, tied to your water and your species, does more than a long list of broad ones.

Broad tags put a post into a topic where it is buried within seconds by accounts with far more output.

Which search phrases genuinely get typed is enumerated in the keyword list piece.

Is there a published reach figure for hashtags?

None was located, and none is asserted anywhere on this page.

The optimal-hashtag-count numbers in circulation come from agency blog posts citing other agency blog posts, and research for this page found no platform-published figure behind any of them.

No count, no reach uplift, no discovery percentage and no benchmark for guiding accounts appears here, in any market, and no substitute has been invented to occupy the gap.

What can be said without a source is structural rather than numeric.

A tag with fewer posts in it is a smaller room, and a post stays visible in a smaller room for longer.

A tag naming your actual water is smaller than a tag naming your state, which is smaller than a tag naming the sport.

That ordering holds without needing a single figure, and it is enough to make the decision with.

The same reasoning applied to short video is set out in the reels piece.

What do the long-running accounts do differently?

They fix the tag once and never think about it again.

They pick one place record, save the tag list in a note on the phone, and paste the same block onto every post.

The list is short, usually somewhere between five and ten, and every entry names either the water, the species or the nearest town.

They stop chasing the tag that is trending, because the audience arriving from a trending tag is not booking a trip on that water.

They tag the ramp town rather than the county, because a client searching for a trip searches a town.

They write the place name into the caption in plain words as well as tagging it, since the caption is read by people and by search.

And they leave the tag block identical for years, which quietly builds one archive instead of forty fragments.

The wider search foundation under all of this belongs to the local search piece.

Where do guides go wrong with tags?

Seven habits, and the first two are the expensive ones.

Tagging a different place record every week, which fragments a season of posts across several archives that never accumulate.

Using the broadest tags available, which files every post into a topic where it is invisible within a minute.

Copying a tag block from another guide in another state, which advertises the wrong water to the wrong audience.

Tagging a trending topic that has nothing to do with fishing, which is exactly the behaviour published content guidance warns against.

Writing only the official name in the caption when nobody local says it that way.

Writing only the local name on the website, where a visitor from out of state has no idea what it refers to.

And tagging a place you were not actually at, which is a claim about where you fish and eventually gets noticed by somebody who knows the water.

The equivalent set of mistakes on a business profile is enumerated by the profile setup piece.

What surprises people?

That the official name of their water can change without anybody telling them.

Most guides assume the name of the bay they have fished for twenty years is a fixed thing, and 2025 demonstrated otherwise on a national scale.

The second surprise is how long the change takes to arrive everywhere, since a rule published in June 2025 was still being followed by further substitutions in January 2026.

The third is that nothing compels a private platform to follow at all, so a place record can carry a name the federal government no longer uses, indefinitely.

Which means a guide can be perfectly correct and perfectly out of step at the same time, depending on which register you check against.

The fourth is that this is not a problem to solve. It is a condition to work inside.

The name you use is a choice about who finds you, and there is no authority to appeal to that settles it.

What that means for the pictures attached to those tags is covered in the trip photos piece.

Should you tag the exact spot?

No, and the reason is operational rather than sentimental.

A location tag on a post is a public statement about where a fish came from, timestamped and permanent.

On pressured water that information moves quickly, and the people it moves to are not booking trips.

The working compromise is to tag at the level of the town, the ramp or the bay rather than the flat, the hole or the bank.

That is specific enough to reach somebody planning a trip to the area and vague enough to be useless to somebody wanting to stand where you stood.

It also sidesteps the awkward conversation with a client who watched you find a fish and then saw the coordinates published that evening.

Guides who have worked one water for a long time settle on this without anybody telling them to.

The same restraint applies to naming a client in the caption, which is their information to give out rather than yours.

How would you test this yourself?

Search your own water in the application and count the records.

Open the location search inside the posting interface and type the name of the water you work.

Count how many separate place records come back for what is physically the same place, and note which one has the most posts attached.

Repeat with the local name, the formal name and the name of the nearest ramp, since each may return a different set.

That count is your own market's answer and takes about four minutes, which is less time than reading any article about optimal tag counts.

Then ask the next ten booking clients whether they found you through a place search, and write the answers down.

Ten answers from your own market beat any published figure, and there is no published figure here to beat.

The habit of logging where clients came from is described in the search basics piece.

What is the working approach?

One place record, one short tag block, both names in the caption.

Search your water inside the application, pick the place record with the most existing posts, and use that same record on every post from now on.

Build a tag block of roughly five to ten entries naming your water, your species and your nearest town, and save it where you can paste it.

Leave the block alone. Its value comes from repetition rather than from optimisation.

Write the name people say in the caption, and put the formal name on the website page for that water so somebody unfamiliar can place it.

Tag at the level of the bay or the ramp town, never the specific spot.

Ignore trending tags entirely unless they genuinely describe the post.

Check once a year whether the official name of anything you fish has changed, because 2025 established that it can.

How all of this connects to the pages that actually rank is set out in the on-page basics piece.