How to use Hashtags on LinkedIn [2022]

What to learn how to use hashtags on LinkedIn to increase the visibility of your posts? If so, you are in the right place as today; we’re going to cover all things hashtags and how to use them strategically.

Today, we’re going to walk through LinkedIn hashtags and how you can use them to your advantage to increase the visibility of your posts and, consequently, get more engagement and following.

Make sure you read all through this post until the very end, as I’m going to show you exactly how to find the best hashtags for your niche. We will discuss whether or not you should be creating a custom hashtag for your business.

Okay, let’s get to it!

Hashtags are a super powerful way for you to discover the LinkedIn community and reach people with whom you’re not necessarily connected.

If you’re using hashtags correctly, you have the potential to reach so many new eyeballs and allow people outside of your network to engage with your posts.

But before I show you how hashtags work and how you can use them most effectively, let me just quickly clarify what hashtags are in the first place.

What are hashtags on LinkedIn? 

In straightforward terms, a hashtag is a combination of letters, numbers, and sometimes even emojis that follow the hash symbol.

Using hashtags allows platforms such as LinkedIn to understand what your content is categorize it correctly by grouping it with all other posts using the same hashtag.

How hashtags work on LinkedIn

Now let me give you a real-life example, so all of this makes a bit more sense.

You might have noticed that I share weekly insights about LinkedIn, and whenever I publish a new post on the platform, I typically add hashtags such as #LinkedInTips or #LinkedInTraining to my post to make it more discoverable.

When you add a hashtag to your post, it becomes clickable. LinkedIn will take you to the search results for that particular hashtag when you click on it.

So this is not just people in your network; this is this everyone in the LinkedIn community who has published anything using this particular hashtag that you’re now seeing here.

By including hashtags in your posts, you’re telling LinkedIn what your content is about, and you’re allowing the algorithm to understand it and categorize it together with all other relevant content.

This gets exciting because people can follow the hashtags in the areas they care about. In this particular example, if we look at #LinkedInTips, there are over 14,000 people already following the hashtag, which is excellent news for me as it means This many people are already interested in the type of content I’m creating.

Now at this point, you might be wondering where it’s better to use hashtags that have a massive following or small or medium following.

And I will cover this in a minute when I show you how to find the best hashtags for your sector.

But just before we dive into that, I wanted to answer the question I get asked a lot.

“if the hashtag has 20 million followers, does that mean when I include it in my post, Will 20 million people also see my posts?

And the answer to this one is yes and no.

If you specifically click on a hashtag the way we just did, your posts would show up here because these are basically search results for the particular hashtag.

This means they’re bringing back every post that has ever been published using this hashtag.

Now, while some people might be diving into hashtags directly, but still most of us are simply scrolling through our feed. 

So if you’re following a bunch of hashtags, LinkedIn we include these within your feed.

The algorithm is selective as to what to show because you can imagine if they showed everything, your feed would just be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the posts you would get.

Just because you published a post and included the hashtag with 20 million followers does not mean that any of those people will see your posts.

LinkedIn will again monitor how much engagement your post is getting in the first place to decide whether or not to show your posts to more people following the hashtag.

The first couple of hours after publishing your content are key for getting as much engagement as possible, so LinkedIn would keep showing your posts to more and more people.

How to Create a Hashtag on LinkedIn 2021

To create a hashtag on LinkedIn is very, very simple. Still, many times, people overthink it, so I’m just going to do a quick tutorial on how to do so.

Whenever you’re writing a post, you have the option of putting in your hashtags, including common hashtags like marketing or hashtag marketing or hashtag LinkedIn, but you can also create your hashtag.

I highly recommend coming up with your custom hashtag. If you’re going to be putting out content on LinkedIn, it does help you build your audience.

Also read: How to use LinkedIn as a student (2022 tips to secure jobs)

The best hashtag strategy to use right now on LinkedIn

Adding hashtags on LinkedIn is all about finding your sweet spot. You want to research what hashtags are currently used within your field and think about what hashtags your target audience might be interested in.

Our goal with all of this is to get your posts in front of the people you care about.

So we want to be considering what hashtags your target audience might already be following.

A straightforward way to do this research and find other hashtag ideas is to type in your main hashtag within the LinkedIn search box. And you will see that in the dropdown, some other similar hashtag ideas will appear.

So if we search for #Marketing, we get quite a few suggestions through. We look at the main #Marketing hashtag, and you can see that it has 20 million people following the hashtag.

If marketing is your sector, you should click to follow this hashtag.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend adding this hashtag to your posts, especially if you are a new content creator with not too much authority on a platform because your posts could disappear in the sea of all this other content.

But besides that, it’s still an excellent idea to follow all the prominent hashtags to see what content people in your industry share. And it also helps you to find different hashtag ideas by looking at their posts.

So let’s go back to search and narrow our hashtag down.

This time, I’m going to click on #MarketingStrategy. And this particular hashtag, as you see, has a solid number of followers, almost 68,000k. While that’s still relatively big, I would be happy now to include it in my content.

So finding the relevant hashtags for your niche takes a bit of research. Still, it’s worth having a good understanding of the critical hashtags within your field.

So if you have followed a few hashtags thus far, but you’re lost for further inspiration, what you can do now is go back to your home page. Look on the left-hand side of your profile and click on it to discover more sections located on that lower left-hand side of the page.

You will now see recommendations tailored by LinkedIn to you on this page, based on your past activity and the hashtags you have followed thus far.

And it’s just a great place to see a couple of more hashtag ideas that you might not have thought of.

Not only will you find hashtag recommendations here, but also people and companies to follow that LinkedIn thinks you might be interested in.

Broad hashtags vs. niche hashtags on LinkedIn

So broad hashtags or niche hashtags, what should you use in your content?
Like we said, using three hashtags is the best suggestion by LinkedIn. Yes, you can use more. And yes, your content does rank if you do use more.

For example, if you use five hashtags, your content will appear for those hashtags. I know it might sound counterintuitive advice, but LinkedIn says the best practice is to use three hashtags.

I do recommend that we do what they say. They’re telling us without a nugget of information; this is what we’re looking for. And if you can favor your content to the algorithm, it’s going to be shown to more people.

How to manage hashtags on LinkedIn

The next thing I wanted to show you is how you can manage the hashtags you’re following and get rid of the ones you no longer care about.

Now, suppose you go back to your LinkedIn homepage on the left-hand side. In that case, you will already see a few of the hashtags you’re following, but to review all of them, click on the following hashtags button.

On this page, you will see all of the hashtags you’re following thus far, and you can unfollow any of them if you choose to.

You can also click through to these hashtags to see how many followers each of the hashtags have.

See and review the latest content pieces out there to get inspired. You can even find hashtags that other people are using that might be relevant to your field.

The benefits of a personal hashtag on LinkedIn

The idea I wanted to touch upon today is having your custom hashtag.
Creating a unique hashtag for your company or your brand can be a great way to build awareness across all social media platforms.

It allows people to quickly identify who you are and connect with you.

Suppose you create a custom hashtag and add it to all your posts. In that case, people will be able to click on it, and when they do so, they will see every single post you have ever shared in one place, almost as one big blog post.

Keep the conversation going