Our beloved South Beach is in the news and it’s (finally) for a very good reason. Holidu, the search engine for vacation rentals, recently conducted a study of Instagram hashtags and discovered that the most hashtagged beach in the country is right here in Miami: This year, a reported 8,198,730 mentions went to #southbeach! We even beat out runner-up Long Beach by nearly two million hashtags.
To come up with the ranking, Holidu culled from a list of 6,000 beaches in the U.S., narrowing it down to the top 500 based on Google searches. That list was then reduced to the beaches with more than 5,000 queries. From there began the search for the most hashtagged beach in America.
It’s not the most scientific study but we 100-percent support the results. Not only was #southbeach number one, but Florida dominated the top 50 beaches with 17 mentions, which included Palm Beach (number four), Delray Beach (number 12) and St. Pete Beach (number 23).
Seeing #southbeach in the top spot comes as a shock to absolutely no one, especially if you’ve spent some time searching the hashtag on Instagram. From real estate agents to Instagram models to that guy from Idaho who’s staying in Fort Lauderdale but telling his friends he’s in South Beach, it’s a great big swath of people who use the tag. You might see some questionable photos pop up but, in the battle between Instagram versus reality, our actual slice of paradise always comes out on top.