Content Writer
#SocialMedia is all about #Networking, with a pinch of #Innovation in a world ruled by #DigitalMarketing.
You probably recognized the hashtags and tried to click on them. That’s because this structure is more familiar on social media platforms, where hashtags are clickable. So, here’s a question:
What’s the first social media platform you associate with the word “hashtag?” Instagram? Twitter (now X)? Maybe Facebook? Or did your mind wander to LinkedIn?
You might wonder, though, how do hashtags work on #LinkedIn? Is LinkedIn the right platform for using them? Though LinkedIn may seem more suited for job seeking or networking, its content landscape has evolved, and hashtags are becoming more important.
Ready to learn how trending LinkedIn hashtags can grow your network? Stay tuned, because we’ve got you covered.
Short Summary
- Hashtags group social media content by topic, improving visibility and reach on LinkedIn. They allow posts to be discovered by users beyond your network, help you stay updated on specific topics, and can boost your content’s chances of trending for increased business connections.
- Using LinkedIn hashtags is crucial for expanding reach and building community. Focus on a few relevant, industry-specific hashtags to maximize visibility.
- Hashtag generating tools simplify LinkedIn strategy by using AI to suggest relevant hashtags based on your content. SocialBee‘s hashtag generator saves time by finding the best hashtags and allowing you to create collections for easy reuse.
- Manual research on LinkedIn helps uncover industry-specific hashtags by searching keywords, analyzing top posts, and observing competitors.
- LinkedIn’s hashtag pages help you track trending content, gain insights into high-performing posts, and discover relevant hashtags to keep your content and strategy aligned with audience interests.
- Capitalizing multi-word hashtags improves readability and accessibility, while placing hashtags at the end of your LinkedIn posts ensures a professional appearance and better reader engagement.
- Use LinkedIn Analytics to track hashtag performance, refine your strategy, and select the most effective tags for improving visibility and building a stronger network.
- LinkedIn recommends using 2-5 well-selected hashtags, balancing popular, niche, and branded tags to increase reach and engage your target audience without overwhelming your post.
What Are Hashtags?
The main thing that hashtags do is group your social media content. In this case, we’re talking about topics, themes, or anything that can fall under a category. Because of this categorizing, your posts get better visibility. For example, if people have an interest in knowing more about social networking, then you can use #SocialNetworking as a hashtag.
Therefore, when you use hashtags your posts will be added to a specific category. Not only will your post be easier to find, but your posts’ reach will also increase. And in this case, it’s going to happen regardless if you’re connected to a person or not on LinkedIn.
Hashtags are versatile and varied. Because of that, it can get difficult to keep in touch with the information you’re interested in. If you want to always be up to date with any new information on a specific topic, most platforms, including LinkedIn, allow you to follow relevant hashtags.
Hashtags can also help your posts trend, which is great for visibility purposes. Increased visibility means more possible connections for your business.
Should You Use LinkedIn Hashtags?
The short answer is: yes! Using hashtags on LinkedIn is an important part of your social media strategy, as it can help expand your reach organically and build a community around your brand.
It’s no secret that LinkedIn is a powerful platform to use. Making professional connections, marketing services, and producing content are only a few examples. There is something for every professional, which is why creating successful LinkedIn posts can be a game-changer.
If you decide to incorporate hashtags in your LinkedIn posts, keep in mind that best practices vary depending on the platform. Don’t just take your hashtag strategy from another social media network and copy-paste it to LinkedIn. For example, adding a lot of hashtags may work on Instagram, but on LinkedIn, it doesn’t do the trick.
Instead, your LinkedIn hashtag strategy should focus on using only a few hashtags that are relevant to your industry and have the potential to increase your reach. For reference, here are LinkedIn’s top 30 hashtags as of January 2024:
- #innovation
- #management
- #digitalmarketing
- #technology
- #creativity
- #futurism
- #startups
- #marketing
- #socialmedia
- #socialnetworking
- #motivation
- #personaldevelopment
- #jobinterviews
- #sustainability
- #personalbranding
- #education
- #productivity
- #travel
- #sales
- #socialentrepreneurship
- #fundraising
- #law
- #strategy
- #culture
- #fashion
- #business
- #networking
- #hiring
- #health
- #inspiration
So, how can you find the best hashtags for your posts?
How to Research and Create LinkedIn Hashtags
Now that you know hashtags are an important part of your LinkedIn strategy, you must be wondering how to find relevant hashtags for the platform. There are various ways in which you can find popular LinkedIn hashtags to use in your posts:
- Use hashtag generating tools.
- Manually search for hashtags.
- Analyze competitor’s posts.
- Follow hashtag pages.
1. Use Hashtag Generating Tools
Hashtag generating tools are a great way to simplify your LinkedIn strategy. By leveraging AI-powered suggestion tools, you can easily discover relevant hashtags tailored to your content. These tools analyze your post’s text and media to recommend trending and industry-specific hashtags that can help increase your reach and engagement.
PRO TIP
Want to add the right LinkedIn hashtags to your posts without spending too much time finding them? With SocialBee, all you need to do is add your caption or visual to the platform, and the hashtag generator will find the best hashtags related to your content.
Moreover, you can create and save hashtag collections, allowing you to organize and easily reuse the best-performing hashtags across multiple posts.
Easily generate hashtags or add existing ones from your Collections to all your LinkedIn posts.
2. Manually Search for Hashtags
Sometimes, a little manual research is all it takes to find the perfect hashtags for your LinkedIn content. By rolling up your sleeves and diving into the platform, you can uncover industry-specific hashtags by searching keywords, analyzing top posts, and even checking what your competitors are using.
LinkedIn’s search bar is your starting point — simply type in relevant terms, explore the posts that appear, and take note of the hashtags that are driving engagement. This old-school approach might take a bit more effort, but it’s a surefire way to ensure your hashtags are perfectly aligned with your content.
3. Analyze Competitor’s Posts
Keeping an eye on your competitors is a smart move when crafting your hashtag strategy. By analyzing the hashtags they’re using, you can identify which ones are driving engagement in your shared audience.
Spot competitors with high interaction rates and take note of the hashtags they rely on. This insight can help you incorporate similar tags into your own strategy and discover new ones that you may have overlooked.
4. Follow Hashtag Pages
LinkedIn’s hashtag pages are a goldmine for staying on top of trending content in your niche. By following specific hashtags, you can easily track what’s resonating with your target audience and discover new ideas for your own posts.
These pages allow you to see the kind of content being shared and how well it’s performing, giving you valuable insights into what hashtags are worth incorporating into your strategy. Following these pages keeps you in the loop, ensuring your content remains relevant and your hashtags are always on point.
How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Hashtags
There are a few rules to be followed if you want to make sure you’re maximizing the use of hashtags on LinkedIn. These are 4 best practices for LinkedIn hashtags that every social media marketer needs to know before starting to use the platform:
- Capitalize all words.
- Add hashtags at the end of the post.
- Use LinkedIn Analytics.
- Combine popular hashtags with branded and niche hashtags.
1. Capitalize All Words
It is recommended to capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag that contains multiple words. This makes hashtags more readable and increases accessibility.
People with visual impairments or who are blind can rely on screen readers to audibly read web material. Hashtags can usually be read aloud correctly by screen readers due to the use of capitalization to distinguish each word in the hashtag.
For example, if you’re going to share some tips for digital marketers in your LinkedIn post, use #DigitalMarketingTips instead of #digitalmarketingtips.
2. Add Hashtags at the End of the Post
Where you place your hashtags does not influence LinkedIn’s categorization algorithm, but it can affect the way your post is perceived by readers. Having hashtags riddled throughout your text can make it harder to follow or give it an unprofessional feeling.
Similarly, adding your hashtags at the top can lower your engagement due to LinkedIn’s feature of displaying only the first few lines of longer posts. It’s one thing to hook your audience with a strong starting sentence, and it’s another to simply greet them with a few hashtags that have no context.
Lead with the information, and add your hashtags at the end.
3. Use LinkedIn Analytics
Use LinkedIn Analytics to fine-tune your hashtag approach. You can find out which hashtags are working best for reaching your audience by looking at your post performance data. Use this information to refine your approach and select hashtags that are most relevant to your audience and help you achieve your content objectives.
Analytics allow you to monitor the efficacy of various hashtags over time, revealing which ones boost exposure and which ones don’t. You can improve your LinkedIn appearance and develop a more impactful network with this data-driven method that helps remove guesswork.
PRO TIP
With SocialBee, optimizing your content strategy and enhancing your LinkedIn presence is easy. Make informed, data-driven decisions by keeping tabs on your post reach, likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement to spot valuable trends.
Dive into SocialBee’s Analytics to track how your LinkedIn posts perform over time. Discover which content generates the most engagement and see if certain hashtags correlate with your posts’ success.
Unlock the power of data with SocialBee’s Analytics feature.
4. Combine Popular Hashtags with Branded and Niche Hashtags
LinkedIn recommends that you use 2-5 hashtags in your posts. While there is no limit to how many hashtags you can use, adding more might make your post look like spam and decrease your reach and engagement. With the way LinkedIn’s algorithm is designed, sticking to a few well-selected hashtags is enough to make a difference.
It’s important when selecting which hashtags to use to strive for a combination of popular, niche, and branded hashtags. Trending hashtags bring your post to a bigger audience because of their high search volume. Niche hashtags help you get discovered by people who are interested in exactly what you have to offer. And, last but not least, branded hashtags can help you build a community.
Benefits of Using LinkedIn Hashtags
Now that you’ve got an understanding of how to find hashtags and effectively use them, it’s time to move on to the next question. What benefits will adding relevant hashtags on LinkedIn bring? We’ve compiled a shortlist below:
- Expand your organic reach: Relevant hashtags help your content reach beyond your immediate network, increasing visibility and engagement potential.
- Build industry connections: Hashtags make it easier to join relevant conversations and connect with professionals, potential clients, or collaborators in your field.
- Promote events and products: Branded hashtags can boost awareness around your campaigns, events, or product launches, encouraging user engagement and community building.
- Increase brand visibility: Using trending and niche-specific hashtags ensures your posts are discovered by the right audience, helping you grow your brand and network.
- Conduct audience and competitor research: Following relevant hashtags gives insights into your audience’s interests and your competitors’ strategies, helping you stay ahead in your industry.
Frequently Asked Questions
It’s Time To Grow Your Following With LinkedIn Hashtags!
LinkedIn hashtags make it easier for your content to be discovered by the public. Thus, they can be considered a great way to grow your network. Of course, there are some rules to using these hashtags. In the end, though, they’ve been designed to ensure your success.
Depending on your business needs, you can determine when and how to add these hashtags to your posts. Either way, if you can use them and benefit from more traffic, why not take advantage?
As long as the hashtags you use are suitable for your business, you are on the right track. Pair them with catchy and great content, and the results will follow.
If you want to take your LinkedIn strategy to the next level, use SocialBee to create, schedule, and analyze your content in one place. Start your 14-day free trial today!
