Did you know that the technical term for a hashtag is octothorpe? This is exactly the kind of boring content that is well received by LinkedIn, the world’s largest social media platform for professionals. (Professional botanist.)
Over 830 million users search and apply for jobs, join groups and share business news on LinkedIn. Connectivity is the primary goal of LinkedIn, whether you’re building your personal network or promoting your business. Adding relevant hashtags to your LinkedIn posts helps people find you and make those connections.
But what hashtags do you use? How much per post? How else can you use hashtags besides content to find fellow professionals?
Go from #clueless to #confident with this complete guide to using LinkedIn hashtags, including the best tags to use in 2022.
LinkedIn hashtags are any combination of letters or numbers without spaces that follow the # symbol.
For example #thisisahashtag and #ThisIsAHashtag. (Functionally, it’s the same hashtag in either format, but I’ll explain later why you have to capitalize each word.)
How do LinkedIn hashtags work? They act as shortcuts to your content and bring in more views, clicks, and connections. Clicking on a hashtag will display all LinkedIn posts that use that tag. Users can also search for the hashtag in the LinkedIn search bar.
Popular hashtags change frequently and most of them vary by industry, but here are the top LinkedIn hashtags by followers in 2022.
- #India – 67.6 million
- #Innovation – 38.8 million
- #Management – 36 million
- #Human resources – 33.2 million
- #DigitalMarketing – 27.4M
- #Technology – 26.4 million
- #Creativity – 25.2 million
- #Future – 24.6 million
- #Futurism – 23.5 million
- #Entrepreneurship – 22.7 million
- #Career – 22.5 million
- #Markets – 22.2 million
- #Startups – 21.2 million
- #Marketing – 20.3 million
- #SocialMedia – 19.7M
- #Venture Capital – $19.3M
- #Social networks – 19 million
- #LeanStartups – 19 million
- #Economy – 18.7 million
- #Economy – 18 million
LinkedIn hashtags can help you:
- Find and connect with people in your industry.
- Expand your organic reach and – fingers crossed – go viral.
- Build a community around your organization (eg #HootsuiteLife).
- Promote your events or products.
Getting attention for your content is half the battle for social media marketers. Hashtags will help you with this. But that’s not all they do.
to be seen
Most people use LinkedIn to connect with colleagues or look for a new job (or both). LinkedIn hashtags are the best way to bat and get attention for your content, whether your goal is to build a personal network, get followers for your company page, or attract talent.
Creating posts with popular hashtags on LinkedIn is a good idea because it can get you tons of views if your content goes viral. However, be careful jumping on trends. Make sure it aligns with your brand and content strategy, and makes sense to post. If not, skip it and wait for a popular trend that suits your brand.
Better yet, stay on top of the trends with our free Social Trends 2022 report. Create successful content now and find out where social media is headed in the next few years.
Explore your audience
Find out what your audience wants by following hashtags on topics that interest them. What hashtags do they use? What hashtags are your competitors using?
Hashtag tracking is an easy and free way to get first hand information about your target audience and keep your competitive research up to date.
I’ll cover how to do this later, but also check out our LinkedIn analytics guide for more audience research tips.
How to create a hashtag on LinkedIn
There are two types of “hashtagged”content you can post on LinkedIn:
- A post that can be text, or contain photos, videos, documents, or other media files.
- An article intended for long articles and functioning as a mini-blog of sorts. They are most often used in personal profiles for thought leadership.
You can also launch a newsletter or post an audio event, but this article focuses on using hashtags to get more views on your posts and articles.
Add a hashtag to your LinkedIn post
Click “Start Posting”at the top of the LinkedIn home page and enter your post, then click “Add Hashtag”in the LinkedIn post editor. It just puts # in your post, so you can also type # yourself, which is much faster…
When you enter your hashtag, LinkedIn will offer you some popular options.
However, there’s an even easier way: scheduling your LinkedIn posts and all other social media content with Hootsuite. Write single posts or use bulk scheduling to schedule posts weeks in advance in minutes. Plus, always know when is the best time to post with powerful analytics and growth tools.
Watch this two-minute video to learn how to save hours each week:
Add a hashtag to a LinkedIn article
On the main page, click Write an article. You can write hashtags in your article as text and once you publish it, they will turn into clickable hashtags.
Add hashtags to your company page on LinkedIn.
Adding hashtags to your page helps categorize you, so the algorithm will show your content to LinkedIn users who follow and search for those hashtags.
On your company page, click “Hashtags”.
Choose up to 3 that represent what you do and what you post about, while remembering to choose the hashtags your target audience is looking for.
A brand new page, or haven’t you updated it in a while? Learn about other quick ways to optimize your company’s LinkedIn page.
Add hashtags to your personal LinkedIn profile
To add hashtags to your personal profile, you first need to turn on Creator Mode on LinkedIn. Go to your profile and scroll down to the Resources section located below the Header and Analytics sections. Click on Creator mode.
Turn on Creator mode and you can add up to 5 hashtags (plus access to LinkedIn Live posts, audio events, and the newsletter feature).
This is quick to do and can make a difference in building your network. On the My Network page, LinkedIn recommends posts, people, groups, and more based on your activity and the hashtags you follow.
This is where these tags come in – showing you as a recommendation to other users for the hashtags you choose (displayed as “Talk about ____”). While not a growth strategy in and of itself, it can constantly attract new connections.
When you follow LinkedIn hashtags, you’ll see more posts in your homepage feed containing and related to those topics. You also get quick access to your tags in the left sidebar, so you can quickly see what’s new on LinkedIn.
Clicking on a hashtag opens all LinkedIn content that also uses that tag. Or you can search for the hashtag in the search bar and then click on the Posts tab.
Click on the hashtag, then click the Subscribe button. Voila – you will now see new posts using this tag in your feed and it will appear in your list of hashtags you follow.
Yes, using the right LinkedIn hashtags will help you get views. But it can also help you make connections.
Everyone should follow at least a few LinkedIn hashtags related to your industry. Get in the habit of scrolling through posts and leaving meaningful comments on three of them at least once a week. Don’t try to sell or promote yourself – just offer a thoughtful opinion or helpful advice.
For company pages, do the same, but try to focus on clients or experts talking about important topics in your industry. Take part in a poll or debate, leave a comment, or thank someone for sharing a product review.
Set a goal to use hashtags to generate 3 proactive connections per week as part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Capitalize every word
For multi-word hashtags, it’s best to capitalize the first letter of each word. So instead of #socialforgood write #SocialForGood.
Using capital letters makes reading easier for everyone, but most importantly, makes it more accessible. Blind and visually impaired people use screen readers to read web content aloud. When it comes to hashtags, screen readers rely on capitalization to identify each word in a hashtag and read it out loud accurately.
Put hashtags at the end of the post
Don’t bury your lead, bury your hashtags. Depending on the length of your post, LinkedIn only shows one or two lines in users’ home feeds.
Where you place hashtags in posts doesn’t affect the algorithm, so placing them at the top won’t cause them to show up more often. In fact, it will probably hurt your reach as you should try to grab attention with your main point right away.
Use both generic and niche hashtags in every post.
LinkedIn recommends only 3 hashtags per post, but there are no limits. If you add 10, your post will still show up for all 10 hashtags. LinkedIn’s recommendation is probably based more on aesthetics and doesn’t want people to put 100 hashtags on every post, cluttering up users’ home feeds.
So while you don’t have to limit yourself to three, don’t overdo it and don’t look at spam.
For each post, choose 1 or 2 general hashtags and 1 or 2 very specific hashtags. Why? This gives you the best chance of your post being seen by the right audience: those who are interested in your general topic and those who share your unique point of view or special interest in that topic.
Here’s what it looks like.
This post below is for a specific audience: social media managers. And more specifically, those who want to save time or be more productive.
Knowing this, I can easily select a few common hashtags that I know social media managers follow, such as #SocialMediaMarketing and #SocialMedia. But how do I target my productivity nerd buddies?
Enter: LinkedIn search tab. To do this, I want to find a productivity hashtag with a decent amount of followers.
Typing #productivity displays the most popular tags. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to see all of these hashtags sorted by popularity on LinkedIn, but check out the top tags of 2022 and recommended tools at the end of this article to make it easy.
By clicking on a few hashtags that I think fit, I compare how many followers each one has.
You don’t always have to pick the one with the most followers. Actually, it might not be specific enough. #productivity has over 8 million followers here. For my post, this is a general hashtag, not specific to who I want to target (social media managers).
Even though #SocialMediaManager only has 8,500 followers, it’s a much more targeted hashtag to reach that audience. For this post, it makes sense.
Of course, you can always be a rebel and use both #SocialMediaManager and #Productivity if you feel uncomfortable.
