Did you know that the popular social networking platform LinkedIn has amassed more than 770 million users worldwide?
It is no longer just a job hunt platform. B2B brands, content creators, marketers, and even B2C companies use it to generate leads, build their network, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, and more.
Are you using LinkedIn to its best potential?
With other popular social networks and new ones emerging constantly, many tend to put LinkedIn in the back seat – which is a grave mistake. It’s an incredibly powerful platform, which can help you get the attention of your target audience when used right.
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And, one of the best features LinkedIn has to offer is its hashtags. Hence, in this comprehensive guide, you’ll find everything you need to know about LinkedIn hashtags to upgrade your LinkedIn marketing strategies.
What is Linkedin Marketing?
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The process of making valuable professional connections, enhancing brand awareness, and generating leads is all part of LinkedIn marketing.
By sharing valuable content consistently, potential clients or customers will recognize you (or your company) as an authority figure in your niche. Before it became a professional network, LinkedIn was all about career networking.
Today, you can use it to connect with new customers, new employees, potential business partners, and even competitors.
Whether you have a business LinkedIn page or a personal page, the hashtag strategies laid out for you will help you acquire qualified leads, hire new talent, and make your brand known to its millions of users.
How to Use Hashtags Effectively on LinkedIn?
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The hashtag feature was introduced by LinkedIn in 2018. It’s a popular staple element used on other social media platforms to group content together.
But how can hashtags help you boost the engagement level and your company presence on LinkedIn?
Research indicates that by incorporating hashtags in your LinkedIn marketing strategy, you can enhance your reach by 10%. So, if you have been putting off the hashtags until now, this is a great incentive to begin.
If you get enough reach, the algorithm will push your content to second and third connections. Moreover, these hashtags can be placed on company pages, personal profile pages, articles, posts, and even your summary.
Therefore, LinkedIn hashtags allow you to attract more readership. And, you don’t need to be a hashtag wizard to achieve that. This section sheds light on strategies and best practices to help you unlock the power of LinkedIn hashtags.
How to Use LinkedIn Hashtags on Status Update?
As mentioned earlier, hashtags are important to get a better reach for your LinkedIn posts (or status updates). The type of hashtag you select depends on whom you want to see your post and what you intend to achieve with it.
You can either place the hashtags at the end or within the post (granted that it’s incorporated tastefully and not for the sake of it.) The third option is not to include the hashtags in the post at all but type them in the comments instead.
How to Use Hashtags on Your LinkedIn Article?
Unlike LinkedIn posts, you should not insert hashtags in the LinkedIn articles. After writing and editing the article, when you finally hit ‘Publish’, you’ll be asked to type in the article description.
And, this is where you should input the hashtags.
How to Use Hashtags on Your Business Page?
Your company can benefit from LinkedIn hashtags too. B2B marketers can leverage the power of hashtags to increase visibility and expand their reach. In order to thrive on LinkedIn, you need to incorporate hashtags in your posts, profile, and articles.
Whether you’re educating your audience, announcing a product launch, or promoting your existing products or services, hashtags can provide you with the boost you need to reach a wider pool of audiences.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with various hashtags to understand which ones perform best for your company. Using the right hashtags is key for B2B brands to find success on LinkedIn. There’s a way you can keep track of hashtags being used by your competitors.
For example, type #socialselling in the search bar and sort the results by ‘Companies’. The screenshot below shows that this hashtag has been used by a company called DigitalMarketer in their ‘About Us’ section.
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How to Use Hashtags to Personalize Social Selling through Videos?
What exactly is social selling on LinkedIn?
It refers to leveraging LinkedIn to find prospects and leads and build a strong professional relationship with them in order to drive sales. You may get in touch with a prospect on Monday, schedule a call with them on Wednesday, and close the deal before the weekend ends.
All this comes under LinkedIn social selling. However, without an appropriate strategy, you won’t get the results you’re hoping for. Plan your LinkedIn social selling strategy around hashtags that are relevant to your company or personal brand.
But chances are these exact strategies are also being employed by your competitors. Just like you, their sales reps are trying to capture the attention of your prospects. In such a scenario, it’s important to stand out.
And what better way of prospecting on LinkedIn than to send effective video messages?
Using Hippo Video, you can not only create 1:1 LinkedIn prospecting videos but also track video analytics such as watch rates, user profiles, and locations. Hence, you never miss out on a chance to engage with an active lead.
How to Find Top LinkedIn Hashtags
After all this information, you must be wondering – how do I find the relevant or popular LinkedIn hashtags to use?
For starters, this list of 100 most popular hashtags on LinkedIn might help. Among these, you can pick those that are relevant to your business. There are many tools you can use. For example, LinkedIn Hashtag Chrome Extension offers various hashtagging capabilities.
Install the extension and type in any keyword to see the number of followers. Another tool called Hashtag Generator allows you to generate a good hashtag for the keyword you enter. At a time, you can generate as many as 100 hashtags for a single keyword.
Seek Metrics offers 22 social media tools, including a hashtag generator that you may use to find relevant hashtags for your brand.
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12 Tips for Effective Linkedin Hashtag Strategy
In this section, you’ll find important tips or LinkedIn hashtag best practices you must follow for an effective LinkedIn hashtag strategy:
- Add hashtags (3-5) when you create a post or article:
While using 5-6 hashtags in a post or article shouldn’t do you any harm, it’s best to keep the hashtag count under five. Ideally, you should include 3-5 relevant hashtags per LinkedIn article or post. You may think that this recommendation is incredibly low when compared to Instagram and Twitter.However, these platforms are considered more hashtag-friendly places, while LinkedIn is still a professional networking platform at its core. Therefore, you need to exercise brevity when incorporating hashtags on LinkedIn.Failing to do so would not only seem unprofessional, but the platform’s algorithm might actually spam your content. Context is important too. Your content should actually be related to the hashtags you’re using. - Use LinkedIn suggested hashtags:
LinkedIn’s algorithm makes it pretty easy for you to find relevant hashtags. It suggests auto-predicted hashtags based on your current followings and other trending LinkedIn hashtags. Considering its recommendation is advantageous.
Start following these recommended hashtags for companies, people, and topics that you find interesting. By doing so, you’ll be able to find like-minded people, valuable content, and other companies operating in your domain.
Apart from that, on the left-hand column of your profile summary, you’ll find “Followed Hashtags”. Click “Discover More” to find new hashtags based on your followings. - Follow hashtags to discover more ideas:
When you tap “Follow” underneath a given hashtag, you will start finding companies and people using the same hashtag in their posts and articles. This would give you some inspiration on content ideas for your next post.Needless to say, you must never plagiarize a piece of content. Even if the topic is similar, you can always give it your own spin, incorporate your advice, experience, tips, and suggestions into it. - Create a branded hashtag:
Creating a branded or custom hashtag works wonders across all social platforms, including LinkedIn, when it comes to building a brand. And there’s another benefit – people who follow your hashtag find your latest posts and articles on the top of their feeds. John Espirian, a LinkedIn consultant and B2B copywriter, explains:“Searching for my own hashtags means I can see when people share my posts. Shares aren’t always easy to see, especially on LinkedIn desktop, so this is a good way to track them.” - Don’t use too many hashtags:
LinkedIn does not put a cap on the number of hashtags that can be used in your content. However, if you’re cross-posting content from more hashtag-friendly platforms, your post may look something like this:
[Source]Not only does it look unprofessional for LinkedIn, but it will be marked as spam by LinkedIn’s algorithm.
Start following these recommended hashtags for companies, people, and topics that you find interesting. By doing so, you’ll be able to find like-minded people, valuable content, and other companies operating in your domain.
Apart from that, on the left-hand column of your profile summary, you’ll find “Followed Hashtags”. Click “Discover More” to find new hashtags based on your followings.
[- Identify your most successful posts:
Experiment with hashtags for at least two weeks and post daily. Now, identify the posts that received a great engagement and were viewed by a significant number of people. Note down the hashtags used in those posts.These might very well be the key to your success on LinkedIn. - A shortlist of top LinkedIn hashtags:
Whatever top LinkedIn hashtags you’re using should have a substantial following on the platform so that your content gets the best organic reach. Ideally, the follower count should be several thousand. However, a few hundred followers on the chosen hashtags would do. Because even if a certain hashtag has 200 followers, not all of them are going to be online on the same day. Therefore, you should prioritize shortlisting hashtags with a higher engagement. That said, make sure they’re relevant to your content. Otherwise, it would just look spammy. - Stay professional:
LinkedIn has evolved a lot over the years, but it still is a professional networking platform. Hence, your content should reflect that professionalism.That’s not to say you cannot post funny, engaging, or even controversial content on LinkedIn. However, try to keep it relevant to your brand as much as possible. - Check similar profiles for the hashtags they use:
Since you’re using LinkedIn, chances are you’re already connected to professionals in your industry. Networking makes all the difference here. For example, if you’re a sales rep, you should follow other sales reps, sales managers, and sales leaders in your industry.Check what they are posting and which LinkedIn hashtags they are targeting. By incorporating those and similar hashtags, you may be able to obtain better reach on your content. - Personalize the message to engage with your audience:
Instead of using LinkedIn hashtags exclusively, try and include at least one short sentence along with them. Whether you’re posting a video or image, combining your hashtags with a meaningful message or even a CTA would help personalize it.As mentioned below, LinkedIn’s algorithm bans spammy, low-quality, and irrelevant content from appearing on users’ feeds. Therefore, using too many hashtags and that too without any context will prove to be detrimental. - Capitalise multi-word hashtags:
If you’re using very niche hashtags in your post or article, it’s best to capitalize the first letter of each word. For example, if you want to include #socialmediamarketing, the better option is to use #SocialMediaMarketing because it’s easy to decipher for the audience.Doing so will not have any negative impact on your reach since the LinkedIn algorithm is case insensitive. Apart from that, you shouldn’t use acronyms like #SMM (social media marketing) in hashtags because the algorithm prefers the complete version.Though abbreviated hashtags are common on other social media platforms such as Twitter, it’s not considered the best practice when it comes to LinkedIn. - Check your spelling:
Recheck your content, including the hashtags, to ensure you’re conveying the right message to your audience. While proofreading the post or article, multi-word hashtags may sometimes get overlooked.Hence, it’s best to double-check your spellings to avoid confusion, embarrassment, and missing your intended audience.
Final Thoughts on LinkedIn Hashtags
The best LinkedIn hashtags have a number of benefits. They allow businesses to target their audience more specifically, give them great exposure, and maximize their reach. It’s important to experiment with different hashtags to spread the word about your company and find new B2B sales leads.
Using appropriate hashtags will help your prospective clients to discover your content, profile, and products. By following the tips laid out in this comprehensive guide, you will find success on LinkedIn.
And, if you want to take your LinkedIn prospecting game to the next level, use Hippo Video to create compelling video sales pitches and leave a lasting impression on your prospect!
