What to learn how to use hashtags on LinkedIn to increase the visibility of your posts?
If so you are in the right place as today, we're going to cover all things
hashtags and how to use them strategically.
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Today, we're going to talk about LinkedIn hashtags and how you can use them to your advantage
to increase the visibility of your posts and consequently, get more engagement and following.
Make sure you watch this video until the very end as I'm going to show you exactly how to find
the best hashtags for your niche and we are you going to discuss whether or not you should be
creating a custom hashtag for your business.
Okay, let's get to it!
Hashtags are a super powerful way for you to get discovered by the LinkedIn community and reach
people that you're not necessarily connected with.
If you're using hashtags correctly, you have the potential to reach so many new
eyeballs and allow people outside of your network to engage with your posts.
But before I show you how hashtags work and how you can use them most
effectively, let me just quickly clarify what hashtags are in the first place.
In very simple terms, hashtag is a combination of letters, numbers, and sometimes even
emojis that follow the hash symbol.
Using hashtags allows platforms such as LinkedIn to understand what your content is
about and categorize it correctly by grouping it together with all other hashtags, all
other posts that are using the same hashtag.
Now let me just give you a real life example, so all of this makes a bit more sense.
You might have noticed that I share weekly insights about LinkedIn, and whenever I publish a
new post on the platform, I typically add hashtags such as #LinkedInTips or #LinkedInTraining
to my post to make it more discoverable.
Now, when you add a hashtag to your post, it becomes clickable.
And when you do click on it, LinkedIn will take you to the search
results for that particular hashtag.
And all of the content you see over here, has been published using that hashtag.
So this is not just people in your network, this is this everyone in the LinkedIn community
who have published anything using this particular hashtag that you're now seeing here.
By including hashtags in your posts, you're telling LinkedIn what your content is
about, and you're allowing the algorithm to understand it and categorize it
together with all other relevant content.
Now, where this gets really exciting is that people can follow the
hashtags in the areas they care about.
In this particular example, if we look at #LinkedInTips, there are over 14,000 people
already following the hashtag, which is great news for me personally, as it means
that this many people are already interested in the type of content I'm creating.
So if we look at a few other examples here, you can see that over 20 million people are
following the #Marketing, 4 million people are following the #RealeEstate, 50,000 people over
here are following the #Event and 28,000 people are following the #B2Bmarketing and so on.
Now at this point you might be wondering where it's better to use hashtags that have a
massive following or small to medium following.
And I will absolutely cover this in a minute when I show you how to find
the best hashtags for your sector.
But just before we dive into that, I wanted to answer the question I get asked a lot, and that
is if the hashtag has 20 million followers, does that mean when I include it in my post
20 million people will also see my posts?
And the answer to this one is yes and no.
If you specifically click on a hashtag that way we just did, your posts would definitely show
up here, because these are basically search results for the particular hashtag, which means
they're bringing back every single post that has ever been published using this hashtag.
Now, while some people might be diving into hashtags like this, most of us
are simply scrolling through our feed.
So if you're following a bunch of hashtags, LinkedIn we include these within your feed,
but the algorithm is selective as to what to show, because you can imagine if they showed
everything, your feed would just be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the posts you would get.
You might recall that in my recent video on how to get more followers, I mentioned
that LinkedIn monitors how much engagement, meaning how many likes, comments and clicks
to read more, your post gets to decide how many people to distribute your content to.
And if you're a business owner looking to grow your company page, definitely
check that video out later on.
But to summarize, if you publish a post and say you have 500 connections, it does
not mean that LinkedIn will show your post to all those 500 connections right away.
The way LinkedIn algorithm works, is that it shows your post to a smaller group of people first,
and it monitors how much engagement it gets.
So if your post gets enough likes and comments, then LinkedIn will continue
showing it to more and more people.
However, if it doesn't, and it's not getting much engagement, LinkedIn just
will stop showing it to your connections.
So having 500 connections, does not mean that you will get 500 people actually seeing your posts.
The reason why I'm sharing this, is because hashtags work in a very similar way.
Just because you published a post and you included the hashtag that has 20 million
followers, does not mean that any of those people will actually see your posts.
LinkedIn will again be monitoring how much engagement your post is getting in a first
place to decide whether or not to show your posts to more people following the hashtag.
So, as you can imagine, the first couple of hours after publishing your content
are key for getting as much engagement as possible so that LinkedIn would keep
showing your posts to more and more people.
Let me know in the comments below, if you have noticed LinkedIn doing this and
how would you feel about the algorithm?
So now that we understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works, let's dive into finding the
best hashtags for your niche and figuring out whether or not you should be going for hashtags
that have a lot of following or a smaller one.
Adding hashtags on LinkedIn is all about finding your sweet spot.
You want to research what hashtags are currently getting used within your field,
and also thinking about what hashtags your target audience might be interested in.
Our goal with all of this, is to get your hashtags, sorry, is to get your posts
in front of the people you care about.
So we want to be considering what hashtags your target audience might already be following.
A very simple way to go about this research and to find other hashtag ideas, is to type in your
main hashtag within the LinkedIn search box.
And you will see that in the dropdown, some other similar hashtag ideas will appear.
So if we search for #Marketing, we get quite a few suggestions through.
We look on the main #Marketing hashtag, you can see that it has 20
million people following the hashtag.
If marketing indeed is your sector, you should absolutely click to follow this hashtag.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend adding this hashtag to your own posts, especially if you
are a new content creator with not too much authority on a platform, because your posts could
disappear in the sea of all this other content.
But besides that, it's still a really good idea to follow all the big hashtags, to see what
content people in your industry are sharing.
And it also helps you to find different hashtag ideas through looking at their posts.
So let's go back to search and try to narrow our hashtag down.
This time, I'm going to click on #MarketingStrategy.
And this particular hashtag, as you see, has a solid number of followers, almost 68,000.
And whilst that's still a relatively big, I would be happy now to include it in my own content.
So finding the relevant hashtags for your niche takes a bit of research, but it's
definitely worth having a good understanding of what are the key hashtags within your field.
So if you have followed a few hashtags thus far, but you're lost for further inspiration, what
you can do now is go back to your home page.
Look on the left hand side of your profile and click on to discover more section located
in that lower left hand side of the page.
On this page, you will now see a recommendations that are tailored by LinkedIn
to you, based on your past activity and the hashtags you have followed thus far.
And it's just a great place where to see a couple of more hashtag ideas,
that you might have not thought of.
Not only will you find hashtag recommendations here, but also people and companies to follow
that LinkedIn things you might be interested in.
The next thing I wanted to show you is how you can manage the hashtags you're following and how to
get rid of the ones that you no longer care about.
Now, if you go back to your LinkedIn homepage on the left hand side, you will already see a
few of the hashtags you're following, but to review all of them, simply click on the follow
hashtags button on this page, you will see all of the hashtags you're following thus far, and
you can unfollow any of them if you choose to.
You can also click through to these hashtags, to see how many followers each of the hashtags
have, and basically see and review the latest content pieces out there, just to get inspired
and possibly even find hashtags that other people are using that might be relevant to your field.
The idea I wanted to touch upon today, is having your own custom hashtag.
Creating a unique hashtag for your company or your brand can be a great way to
build awareness across all social media platforms and allow people to identify who
you are easily and to connect with you.
If you do create a custom hashtag and add it to all your posts, people will be able to click
on it and when they do so, they will literally see every single post that you have ever shared
in one place almost as one big blog post.
So, this is another great way of how to show up and be found by other people.
If you are planning to create a custom hashtag for your business, let me know what that is
in the comments below, as I'd love to see it.
We have covered so many great things today, but if you would like some additional help with hashtags,
be sure to download my Ultimate LinkedIn Hashtag Guide, that includes tips on how to optimize your
hashtags as well as some big LinkedIn hashtag no-no's that you definitely want to be avoiding.
I'm going to put a link to this guide in the description below, so just
be sure to grab it after this video.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
I really hope you can see now how LinkedIn hashtags can help you grow.
If this content was useful to you, please give this video a like and subscribe to
the channel, as it really helps me to get discovered within a YouTube algorithm.
If you know anyone else who would benefit from learning more about LinkedIn hashtags,
definitely share this video with them and also check out these videos next of how to
take your LinkedIn game to the next level.
Thank you for being here and will see you again next week.