Best Tips And Tricks For Using Hashtags On LinkedIn

To say that you've probably heard about hashtags on Twitter and Instagram is an understatement. Even though they were once merely a way to tag interesting or trending topics on social media, hashtags are now found all over the Internet and beyond. People even say "hashtag" out loud when they want to point out how "clever" they are. The hashtag is everywhere, and we cannot escape it.Naturally, this means that hashtags have made their way onto LinkedIn in 2018. For the most part, they work the same way on LinkedIn as they do elsewhere. They are used to tag content and make it easier to discover and track. However, you need to remember that LinkedIn is used by business professionals to connect with one another and promote their brands to each other. This means that any topic that gets the hashtag treatment needs to remain in this realm. You don't want to share the kinds of fun and potentially offensive hashtags that you would spread among your friends on Twitter, and you certainly don't want to share something like #WhyIQuit with potential employers. You can hashtag fun and interesting topics on LinkedIn, but you need to keep things safe for work.

How Hashtags Are Used on LinkedIn

Hashtags can usually be found on the updates that serve as users' LinkedIn posts, although they can also be found on LinkedIn articles. As on other social media platforms, hashtags will make your content more visible and give it a higher chance of being seen by other business professionals, potential employers, and anyone else who might want to view your LinkedIn profile.

Adding a hashtag to a LinkedIn update is incredibly simple. When you want to share an article, video, or an idea, just go to the appropriate field, enter your information, and add the hashtag symbol (#). If you want to add a hashtag to an article that you've written, simply add the hashtag to the article's description. The hashtag will make it easier to find your content, especially if it's a trending topic. You might even be able to get a topic trending if you're lucky.

Helpful Hashtag Tips

If you've spent any amount of time on social media, you've probably noticed that some people use hashtags everywhere. Just about everyone has seen at least one poorly written tweet or Facebook update that includes a #hashtag #on #every #other #word. This is really annoying, and it will look even worse on a professional platform such as LinkedIn. If you're going to use hashtags for your content on LinkedIn, consider these tips.First of all, make sure that you use hashtags on good content. The point of the hashtag is to make your content more visible and easier to find; it's putting your content front and center. Naturally, you want to put your best foot forward, so don't be afraid of saving hashtags for the content that truly deserves to be seen.Second of all, remember how punctuation works with hashtags. Specifically, remember that it doesn't work. Apostrophes, hyphens, commas, and exclamation points don't work with hashtags; the only things that do are letters, numbers, and emoji. The same goes for spaces. Multi-word hashtags do work, but there cannot be any spaces between the words. In order to make these hashtags easier to read, capitalize every word.Third, don't go overboard with your hashtags. As we said before, a lot of people overuse hashtags in their social media content, and it looks terrible. It's hard to read, it smacks of desperation, and it looks unprofessional. It can also get your posts labeled as spam by the LinkedIn algorithm, effectively making it invisible. As a rule, limit your posts to five hashtags. Any more is overkill.You should also make sure that your hashtags are public. LinkedIn profiles aren't always public by default, and hashtagging content on a profile that cannot be seen by everyone defeats the purpose of using hashtags. Go to your profile settings and make sure that your public profile is visible to everyone. LinkedIn has over 562 members in 200 countries, and you want your content to potentially be visible to as many of them as possible.

At the same time, you should tailor your hashtags to fit your brand's niche. There's a niche online for just about every community, and there will be at least one that matches your brand and what it has to offer. Do some research to find the niche or niches that mesh with your brand, and use the appropriate hashtags to appeal to them. This doesn't mean that you can't use popular hashtags once in a while too. The more popular hashtags will make your content more visible, so don't be afraid of them as long as they can relate to your brand's niche.Finally, if you need help deciding what hashtags to use, take a look at the suggested hashtags that LinkedIn will fill in as you type your updates and article descriptions. You shouldn't add them for the sake of it, but by all means use them if they seem like a good fit for your content.

Keep On Reading

This should give you an idea of how to use hashtags for your LinkedIn content, but you should keep on reading other content and following other hashtags for more ideas. If a hashtag is already out there and being followed, it's popular enough that you should be able to gain some readers if you use it for your own content. It's how content becomes trending and how it goes viral.Even though hashtags are often seen as something that is only seen on Twitter and Facebook, they can be used just as effectively on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is aimed at a more professional audience, so you need to keep things safe for work, but you can still gain a sizable readership if you know how to use hashtags effectively. Keep these tips in mind and remember to keep things professional, and your LinkedIn following will continue to grow.