If you’re posting status updates and articles on your LinkedIn business page without hashtags, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to grow your network, increase brand awareness, and boost your lead gen efforts.
Simply tagging your content with relevant hashtags helps new audiences find your content – audiences that wouldn’t know who you are otherwise.
But without a solid LinkedIn hashtag strategy, it’s difficult to make any real difference in engagement rates on LinkedIn.
So, in this post, we’ll go through how to find the best LinkedIn hashtags, how to add them to your content the right way, and how this will boost your lead gen.
Boost your profile views and engagement rates with better LinkedIn SEO – our guide on the best SEO practices on LinkedIn will show you how.
What are LinkedIn Hashtags?
Hashtags (#) are metadata people use on social media platforms to discover specific content based on topics, news, trends, etc.
Although hashtags are most commonly associated with Twitter and Instagram, they are also used on LinkedIn to archive searchable content.
LinkedIn hashtags are used similar to Twitter or Instagram – they can be added to posts, articles, and profiles to increase reach and engagement on your content.
You can also follow specific hashtags on LinkedIn to keep up to date with news and content on the hashtag feed.
Benefits of Using LinkedIn Hashtags for Lead Gen
There are three key benefits of using hashtags on LinkedIn’s professional network:
Grow your network
When using LinkedIn for lead gen, it’s important to curate a network full of ideal clients and industry connections. This allows you to share your content directly with the very best people.
An easy way to grow your network and ensure those people following you are interested in your business and service is to use relevant hashtags.
Using a list of industry-specific hashtags, connect with people interested in your content and grow your network faster.
Increase brand awareness
You can use hashtags to search for current discussions and offer help to those looking for answers within your niche.
By regularly searching for your industry-specific hashtags and engaging with people using them, you can grow awareness of your brand and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
You can also use specific hashtags to post questions and offer solutions. This will help boost engagement with potential clients and keep your brand showing up in searches.
Help prospects find you
Prospective clients use LinkedIn as a professional search engine to find services they’re in need of. To do this, they’ll use the LinkedIn search bar and use keywords.
By using keywords within your posts, articles, and profile, you help your content show up in potential customer searches.
This is a good reason to use location-based hashtags if you work with local businesses. Users will use LinkedIn to search for “marketing agencies in London”, so having location tags helps LinkedIn categorize your profile and include you in local searches.
Just like optimized LinkedIn ads will put your business in front of your ideal clients, using the right hashtags will help the right clients find you.
Maximize Your Exposure and Generate Leads With LinkedIn Hashtags
In order to maximize your exposure on LinkedIn, you need to find the best hashtags and create a content plan around them.
Using a mixture of high-traffic hashtags as well as more specific ones will help you optimize your content and generate new leads faster.
LinkedIn recommended hashtags
LinkedIn will give you a list of hashtag recommendations based on your profile information. If you’ve optimized your profile, this is a good place to start.
Of course, only use hashtags that are relevant and do a quick search of each one to see what relevant content is popular under that hashtag.
Hashtag search
Do a search on LinkedIn for keywords in your industry. The search will show you popular hashtags based on those keywords. Once you have a few broad hashtags, you can narrow down your search to find more niche ones that will be easier to show up for.
Check out competitors
Look up competitor profiles on LinkedIn to see which hashtags they use in their profiles, posts, and articles.
The posts with the most engagement will indicate which hashtags do well within your industry.
Although you shouldn’t copy a competitor’s hashtag strategy, doing a competitor analysis will help you get started creating your own.
Use your analytics
If you’ve been posting on LinkedIn for any amount of time, you’ll be able to use your analytics to see what content has the most engagement.
When you’ve figured out which topics get the most engagement, you can translate that into hashtags by doing a quick search for related keywords.
Use most-followed hashtags in your niche
Although it’s important to include the most popular hashtags in your industry in your content strategy, you shouldn’t rely on these.
It’s difficult to show up in searches for ultra-popular hashtags because of the competition. However, the more engagement you get, the more likely you are to show up in these searches. So include these in your content marketing too.
Keep on top of new trends
Regularly search for emerging trends in your industry on LinkedIn and use these hashtags to get ahead of the competition. The earlier you can post content with newly trending hashtags, the more likely you are to show up in searches.
Tips and Tricks on Using LinkedIn Hashtags
Once you have a list of hashtags to use in your content strategy, it’s important to use them effectively. Here are some easy tips and tricks to get started on the best foot.
- Don’t space words: even multi-word phrases need to be one long hashtag, such as #contentmarketingstrategy
- Use one or two hashtags per post: using too many hashtags in a single post will flag your content as spam with LinkedIn and reduce your reach considerably.
- Use clear hashtags: very long hashtags can be difficult to understand so aren’t used as often. Try and keep to simple, clear hashtags.
- Incorporate them into your content: it’s best to incorporate hashtags into your sentences where possible rather than adding them to the end of your post. For example, “Our simply #contentmarketingstrategy will help you get more leads.”
How To Use LinkedIn Hashtags
You can use hashtags within your profile, in posts, and in LinkedIn articles. Let’s run through the differences and how to use them in each case.
On LinkedIn articles
- On the homepage, click “write an article” under “update”.
- Once you’re done writing, click “publish” in the top right-hand corner.
- In the pop window, you can add hashtags along with a description that summarizes your article.
- This will appear as commentary above the article once it’s published.
You can’t edit or remove hashtags once you’ve published your article, so take some time to get this just right.
On LinkedIn status updates
When you add a status update to LinkedIn you can add hashtags within the copy or to the end of the post simply by hitting the pound key (#).
When you start writing your hashtag, LinkedIn will automatically give you hashtag suggestions that correspond to what you’re typing.
You can also click the “add hashtag” button to get a longer list of hashtag recommendations.
When adding a hashtag to a status update, it’s best to add them within the text where possible. This looks less spammy than adding a list of hashtags to the bottom of the post.
Make sure the hashtag flows in the copy by replacing a specific word or phrase.
Not sure what to post on LinkedIn? Check out our guide to put a solid content strategy in place.
On business pages
- On your business homepage, click the “add” button on the bottom right under “hashtags”.
- Click “add a hashtag” to add up to three hashtags to your business page.
Since you can only add three, make sure you use relevant hashtags to your niche. Use at least one of the most popular hashtags in your industry, as well as a more niche option to help boost your search rankings.
Creating Your Own LinkedIn Hashtag
A great way to promote your business and encourage user-generated content on LinkedIn is to create your own branded hashtag.
This can be anything related to your business, whether that’s your brand name or something specific to a service or product you provide.
By tagging all of your business content with your own hashtag, you make a searchable archive of your own content that potential customers can search to become more familiar with your brand.
Users can also follow your hashtag to stay up to date with your business, giving you a more direct way of communicating with potential customers and staying front of mind.
When you’re creating your own hashtag, there are a couple of best practices to keep in mind:
- Make sure it’s not already being used on LinkedIn by doing a search for the hashtag you have in mind. You don’t want to compete with another brand for the same hashtag.
- Keep it short and memorable – if it’s too long or complicated, people won’t bother tagging you in anything they post.
- Don’t send dozens of messages to users asking them to follow your hashtag – focus on curating valuable content and users will follow it organically.
- Your business name is usually a good option since this is memorable and will likely be unique on LinkedIn.
FAQs
Do hashtags increase reach on LinkedIn?
The short answer is yes. Users can follow specific hashtags and will get notifications when you post content using those tags. This is an easy way to increase your reach and show up on the feed of users who don’t yet follow you.
What is the ideal number of hashtags for LinkedIn?
Stick to just one or two hashtags per post. Any more than that and your content could get triggered as spam by LinkedIn’s filters. Aim for one popular hashtag and one more niche hashtag per post. The most important thing is to make sure the hashtags work with your content. If you use hashtags that aren’t relevant, people will ignore your content.
How many followers should my hashtags have?
Popular hashtags have thousands or millions of followers, which sounds like a massive audience you could reach. However, you’re much likely to show up on their feed because of the massive level of competition for those popular hashtags. On the other hand, less popular hashtags with just several hundred or thousands of followers don’t have the same potential reach, but you’re much more likely to show up on these feeds.
The best option is to use smaller hashtags in your niche first to build up slowly. Once you’re getting good levels of engagement, work up to more popular hashtags to have a better chance of showing up on feeds.
Use Hashtags to Boost Lead Gen
If you’re posting content to LinkedIn, you should be using the power of hashtags. Hashtags help expand your audience, categorize your content, and give you valuable insights into what content is getting good engagement.
It’s also really simple to implement a hashtag strategy. Once you’ve researched your hashtags and have a list of the best ones to use, add them to your articles and posts periodically to boost your content.
Once you have a wider network of followers and better engagement on your post, you can capitalize on it by sending personalized, automated outreach messages to those engaged followers.
Zopto allows you to reach out to followers on LinkedIn and boost your lead generation much more effectively than doing it manually. Want to see how it works? Request a free demo and we’ll show you how we guarantee more leads for our clients.
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