Want to grow your business in 2021?

Then you must be on LinkedIn!

LinkedIn is THE fastest-growing, business-focused social media network on this planet, with over 700 million members around the globe.

If you and your company don’t have a large following on LinkedIn yet, LinkedIn Hashtags will be your best friend!

They are incredibly powerful and allow you to grow a loyal following of potential customers on LinkedIn.

Mastering hashtags will allow you to get on the LinkedIn trending page and to get selected by the LinkedIn editorial team, which will further boost your organic reach.

In this article I show you how to get the most out of Linkedin Hashtags and what you can do if you want to generate even more high-quality leads for your business on LinkedIn.

Enjoy!

Table of Contents

• What are LinkedIn #hashtags?
• Why is LinkedIn such a great platform for businesses
• Attracting millions of clients with content marketing on LinkedIn
• Top LinkedIn hashtags mistakes to avoid at all costs
  • Avoid spaces and special characters in your LinkedIn hashtags
  • Do not turn every word into a LinkedIn hashtag
  • Do not repeat LinkedIn hashtags more than once
  • Do not use too many LinkedIn hashtags
  • Do not split up two- or three-word LinkedIn hashtags
  • Do not use emojis in your LinkedIn hashtags
  • Do not use irrelevant LinkedIn hashtags
• Best Practices & Recommendations
  • Use location-based LinkedIn hashtags to promote local business and events
  • Prioritise inline LinkedIn hashtags whenever possible
  • Change your LinkedIn privacy settings from private to public
  • Use capitalization to personalize your LinkedIn hashtags
  • Create your own LinkedIn hashtag
  • Add spaces between LinkedIn hashtags
  • Focus on short LinkedIn hashtags, two to three words max
  • Focus on popular LinkedIn hashtags
• How to find the best LinkedIn hashtags to attract new clients and customers
  • Use LinkedIn’s hashtag discovery tool
  • Manage LinkedIn hashtags you already follow
  • Use the LinkedIn search to discover new hashtags
  • Get hashtag inspirations from popular LinkedIn posts
• What are some of the most popular hashtags on LinkedIn?
• Homework: Creating your own LinkedIn hashtag
• Beyond LinkedIn hashtags: The LinkedIn Accelerator Program

What are LinkedIn #hashtags?

LinkedIn hashtags are special text snippets that can be embedded within LinkedIn posts and various other parts within the LinkedIn ecosystem.

Hashtags always start with the # (hash) symbol, immediately followed by the name of the hashtag.

The first occurrence of a space character marks the end of the hashtag.

They can contain a variety of characters including the entire alphabet from A-Z, both in small and large caps, numbers and even emojis.

They allow the LinkedIn algorithm to better understand the relevancy and context of your content.

LinkedIn will then use that information to recommend your content organically to new people who frequently interact with similar content.

This is an incredibly powerful content discovery feature that allows you to quickly attract a laser-focused audience of potential clients and customers for your business.

Why is LinkedIn such a great platform for businesses

LinkedIn is one – if not the – best social media platform for businesses.

It allows its members to find more clients and to attract new customers for their B2B business.

Today, LinkedIn has more than 706 million members in 200 countries and regions worldwide.

141 million members are senior-level influencers and decision makers.

But only 4.2 million members who create content. 

That means that for every content creator, there are 168 members that consume content!

Overall the LinkedIn community is very active. More than 40% of all monthly active users use LinkedIn on a daily basis.

The barrier of participation is very low, and often it’s very easy to reach out to CEOs and company directors, even of larger corporations.

If you are willing to join an outstanding community and build a strong reputation by sharing valuable content while simultaneously building a strong network of authentic relationships, LinkedIn can become your #1 lead generation platform for your business.

Attracting millions of clients with content marketing on LinkedIn

To take advantage of LinkedIn you have to understand how the LinkedIn ecosystem and its artificial algorithms works.

LinkedIn is making the majority of its revenue via two channels. It sells ads and premium subscriptions.

This works because LinkedIn has a high-quality user base who are using LinkedIn on a daily basis.

LinkedIn realized that it could increase the number of daily active users by providing an infrastructure for user-generated content.

Today LinkedIn has 706 million members but only 4.2 million content creators.

This means that every content creator has an incredibly high organic reach.

The reach often grows exponentially when your followers and connections engage with your content. Every time, someone is liking, commenting or sharing your post, some of their followers and connections will see it too.

Today, most of my regular posts generate between 5,000 to 20,000 impressions per post. Every once in a while I am able to create a viral LinkedIn post with a significantly higher number of views.

Some of my past posts generated 100,000+, 250,000, 500,000+ and even 3 million views.

Imagine, if you were able to generate that many eyeballs for you and your business with publishing relevant posts on a regular basis (also known as content marketing on LinkedIn)…

What would you be able to achieve?

If you don’t have a large following yet, LinkedIn hashtags will be your best friend.

They are incredibly powerful for growing a loyal following of potential customers on LinkedIn organically.

Mastering hashtags will allow you to get on the LinkedIn trending page and to get selected by the LinkedIn editorial team, which will further boost your organic reach.

Top LinkedIn hashtags mistakes to avoid at all costs

Avoid spaces and special characters in your LinkedIn hashtags

It’s important to note, that you cannot use empty spaces, dashes, commas, special symbols and other punctuation marks within LinkedIn hashtags.

Example: #LinkedInHashtags works. 

But #LinkedIn Hashtags, #LinkedIn.Hashtags, or #LinkedIn-Hashtags doesn’t.

In this case only #LinkedIn becomes a hashtag, while anything after is just treated a regular word. 

Do not turn every word into a LinkedIn hashtag

#Why? #Because #it #is #very #difficult #to #read! Focus on clarity and readability first and last on hashtags.

If nobody is reading your LinkedIn social media posts, you won’t generate enough engagement for the hashtags to do their magic.

Do not repeat LinkedIn hashtags more than once

Let’s say my hashtag was #LinkedIn. Using the hashtag #LinkedIn once is enough in order to trigger organic discoverability in #LinkedIn.

It doesn’t change how many times I repeat #LinkedIn in my text. If anything this has two negative effects. It will make your text more difficult to read.

And it will negatively impact the maximum number of hashtags in your post which will reduce your organic reach.

Do not use too many LinkedIn hashtags

A good rule of thumbs is 1-5 hashtags per post. 

Anything more and you will negatively impact the organic reach of your post on the LinkedIn platform.

Imagine it like this.

You have one big cake.

Each slice is one hashtag. The more hashtags you have, the less impact each of your hashtags has.

This will make it almost impossible for you to get your post on the LinkedIn trending page.

Do not split up two- or three-word LinkedIn hashtags

If I want to target people who are interested in social media I will use the hashtag #SocialMedia.

I won’t use #social and #media.

Why? Because these are two completely different hashtags for people interested in “social” topics and “media” and press related content.

Keep two and three word hashtags together.

Do not use emojis in your LinkedIn hashtags

Emojis are all hip and cool. And you can actually use them in your hashtags! Cool, right?

Not so fast. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!

Let’s say I want to turn the word travel into a hashtag.

Cool people might think about adding a little airplane at the end. Sure it looks awesome…
#travel…but

People will probably more likely subscribe or remember #travel rather than #travel.

And as a consequence, you wouldn’t benefit at all from organic discoverability.

Do not use irrelevant LinkedIn hashtags

You might get excited.

Oh wow, look at this hashtag!

It has 105,746,221 followers.

And this one has 48,921,810 followers.

LinkedIn’s most popular hashtags, I am going to use all of them!

Don’t!

Unless they are 100% relevant to your post, you’re only going to harm yourself.

LinkedIn focuses on relevancy more than anything.

If you use the wrong hashtags, and LinkedIn shows your post to people who are interested in the hashtags you used, it will track if and how much they engage with your content.

If they don’t engage because your post wasn’t relevant, LinkedIn will no longer show anyone who is following this irrelevant hashtag your content.

Nobody wins in this scenario and you waste some of your precious characters in your LinkedIn post for the wrong hashtags that get you zero reach.

If you recall, each LinkedIn post allows you a limit of up to 1,300 characters so you want to use your characters wisely!

Best Practices & Recommendations

Use location-based LinkedIn hashtags to promote local business and events

Whenever you want to promote something location specific, use location-based hashtags such as  #newyork, #singapore or #london.

I used location based hashtags successfully to promote my VIVID TALKS event series, and they work like a charm! 

Prioritise inline LinkedIn hashtags whenever possible

There are two options when it comes to hashtags on LinkedIn.

You can embed #hashtags within your posts’ description in a natural sounding way, just as demonstrated in this very sentence.

Or you can add the hashtags to the end of your posts.

#inlinehashtags #howtousehashtags

I always recommend to usage of #inline hashtags for three reasons.

It makes your post more readable, it doesn’t look spammy and it saves you valuable characters that you can use to enhance your stories. 

Change your LinkedIn privacy settings from private to public

In order for others to discover your LinkedIn posts organically through the magic of LinkedIn hashtags, it’s important that your profile is set to public.

Otherwise, your content will only be visible to your direct connections and you’re going to miss out on a ton of targeted traffic!

Use capitalization to personalize your LinkedIn hashtags

LinkedIn allows you to use both small caps and ALL CAPS characters within your hashtag.

To LinkedIn, your punctuation doesn’t matter when it comes to organic discoverability.

They treat all hashtags as case insensitive.

Example:

#LinkedIn = #linkedin = #liNkEdiN or any other variation are all the same.

As long as you don’t add any additional characters at the end, you can take advantage of this and give your hashtag a more personal touch with capitalisation.

Instead of #timqueen I can use #TimQueen which is communicating additional information to my readers, for example that my first name is Tim.

For my name that wasn’t a big deal anyway, but there are plenty of cases that easily confuse people.

With #annaagaard is it Ann or Anna? #AnnAagaard gives us clarity and avoids misunderstandings.

Create your own LinkedIn hashtag

One of the best tips that I can give you today is to create your own hashtag.

You can use your name and turn it into a branded hashtag. For example #timqueen

You can use the name of your company or business.

Or you can use the name of your podcast or channel name.

When people want to learn more about you, they can just click on the hashtag name to find more related content.

Keep in mind, that you don’t own the hashtag – even if you are the first person to use it – and that other LinkedIn members can use the same hashtag in their own posts.

Add spaces between LinkedIn hashtags

Another common pitfall with LinkedIn hashtags is a lack of spaces between hashtags.

If you write your hashtags like this, LinkedIn will only recognise the first hashtag and ignore everything after.

#hashtagone#hashtagtwo#hashtagthree

So make sure that you add a space between each hashtag.

#hashtagone #hashtagtwo #hashtagthree

Focus on short LinkedIn hashtags, two to three words max

Finding a cool sounding hashtag is easy.

Take this for example…

#HowToUseLikedInHasthtags

Incredible, can’t get any more specific than this?

But ask yourself…

How many people actually follow this hashtag?

Probably zero.

And how many people would intuitively search for such a long and convoluted hashtag in the LinkedIn search?

Probably not too many either.

So do yourself a favour and never use more than three word per hashtags.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re tempted to use more than four words, try to use several shorter hashtags instead.

Focus on popular LinkedIn hashtags

In order to maximise the potential reach of organic discoverability for your LinkedIn hashtags, all of your hashtags have to have a significant number of followers.

By significant, I am talking about at least a few hundred, ideally several thousand.

The reason for that is, even if a hashtag has 100 followers, that doesn’t mean that all of the 100 people who follow this hashtag would be online on a given day.

And even if they are, LinkedIn might show them competing content and not content from your hashtag.

Prioritise hashtags with high engagement

Some hashtags are dead and have no engagement, even if the follower numbers are high.

This often happens if hashtags have become too popular and many bad actors have abused the hashtag and spammed it with irrelevant posts.

It’s better to have a few medium-sized hashtags with high engagement than gigantic hashtags with no engagement.

How to find the best LinkedIn hashtags to attract new clients and customers

Use LinkedIn’s hashtag discovery tool

Visit the following URL in your web browser to explore interesting LinkedIn hashtags:

Manage LinkedIn hashtags you already follow

To see a list of all the hashtags you follow, visit the LinkedIn homepage and locate the hashtags section in the left sidebar.

Next click on “Discover more”.

Alternatively, you can visit the page directly via this link.

Use the LinkedIn search to discover new hashtags

One of the best tools to find new and exciting hashtags is the LinkedIn search.

Just start typing # followed by a few characters and LinkedIn will present you a list of popular hashtags that start with your search term.

Click on each of the hashtags to learn more about it and to see how many people follow them.

Get hashtag inspirations from popular LinkedIn posts

Pick a starter hashtag from LinkedIn search. Then explore some of the popular hashtags on the hashtag feed.

Click on “read more” and explore if the post is using any other, interesting and related hashtags.

Click on each hashtag to learn more about it.

What are some of the most popular hashtags on LinkedIn?

Homework: Creating your own LinkedIn hashtag

Create your own hashtag for yourself, your brand or your business.

Brainstorm a list of 100 hashtag ideas.

Research each hashtag and write down the number of followers for each hashtag.

Select the top 20 hashtags and create your own personal hashtag collection. You will use these hashtags over and over again.

To ensure that you don’t overuse each of these hashtags, create your own hashtag editorial calendar.

Plan out which hashtags you’re going to share week by week for the next 6 to 12 weeks.

Then use these hashtags to create your daily LinkedIn content.

Beyond LinkedIn hashtags: The LinkedIn Accelerator Program

LinkedIn hashtags are just the first step. If you want to learn what it takes to generate high quality leads for your business, there are a lot more things that you can do.

Join my complete A-to-Z LinkedIn Accelerator Program today and learn how to attract new clients for your small business with a successful LinkedIn strategy in 2021!

15 modules jam-packed with 6+ hours of strategies, tactics, and recommendations on how to build a complete sales funnel on LinkedIn to grow your business in 2021.

What you’ll get:

• How to build a successful LinkedIn sales funnel in 2021 step-by-step
• How to attract an audience of ideal customers on LinkedIn
• How to master LinkedIn’s top 7 content types to attract future clients
• How to use my top 11 content themes and topics to turn maybes into buyers
• How to fit everything into your schedule including daily, weekly, and monthly todo lists!
• How to optimize your LinkedIn profile to close more deals
• How to press the right buttons, so the LinkedIn algorithm loves your content!
• How to grow a huge following of high-quality leads by on LinkedIn with LinkedIn videos
• My top secret LinkedIn A-Z content creation process
• How to build real relationships with future customers
• How to turbo-boost your LinkedIn strategy with LinkedIn ads
• How to achieve exponential LinkedIn growth with my LinkedIn Team Strategies

Click here to sign up now.

The post The LinkedIn Hashtag Guide 2021 appeared first on Tim Queen.