LinkedIn. It plays a huge role in how I land clients and thus,
it's also a big part of what I teach in my program, Revenue Spark.
Maintaining an active profile and focusing on improving your
engagement can work wonders when it comes to boosting your visibility on the
platform,
and it can make it significantly easier to help you connect with people who you
might want to work with.
And one really simple way to improve your post engagement is to use hashtags in
your posts.
So let's talk a little bit about how this feature works and how you can best
utilize it. Hashtags on LinkedIn work very similarly to other platforms.
So LinkedIn uses hashtags to sort of catalog and categorize
the posts that are using that specific hashtag. Let's do a quick screenshare.
So we're on my LinkedIn page, or my newsfeed rather,
and we're going to go through an example. I'm going to search "freelance." Oops,
here we are, freelance writing, and select the hashtag.
And this takes me to the main page for that hashtag, all right?
This number right here reflects how many people are following the hashtag.
And if we scroll down,
LinkedIn will show us all of the posts on the platform where people have
incorporated hashtag freelance writing.
It's really good to check these out because it'll give you an idea of what other
people are already talking about,
and it might give you inspiration for posts that you can share in the future.
And if it's a hashtag that's relevant to you and your business,
then you're probably going to want to follow it.
You'll see the follow button up here. If you're not following it,
it'll say follow, and you just click it.
If you ever want to see all of the hashtags that you're currently following,
you can scroll down here where it says "followed hashtags," click on that and
it'll show you everything you're following.
And also if there's anything that you want to unfollow because it's no longer
relevant to you or your business, you can just click here.
Let's talk a little more about how you can use hashtags to improve your own
exposure and engagement. First of all, let's get this out of the way,
hashtags aren't just for vanity, okay? They're not like an accessory,
They're tools. So you want to use them strategically.
I know that on a platform like Instagram,
which a lot of us use just for personal reasons,
we might add on hashtags just to be silly or funny. For example,
when I use the hashtag "my Chihuahua could beat up your honor roll student," I'm
not really expecting it to bring me any traffic.
The hashtags you use on LinkedIn should be professional and they should be
relevant to the post that they are used in. Remember,
you're going to show up on the page for that hashtag.
So it needs to make sense in terms of the content that you're sharing within
that post.
Let's dive a little more into how exactly you can find a good hashtag.
I'm going to show you my screen again. All right. Right now,
let's say I want to share a post that contains tips for becoming an
entrepreneur.
It's not unreasonable to want to use the hashtag "entrepreneurship" in my post,
but let's take a look at this a little more closely.
If we searched entrepreneurship right here,
take a look at this number again.
This is how many people are currently following this hashtag.
And this is important. You might see this number and think, you know,
the bigger, the better, but that's not necessarily the case.
The more popular a hashtag is, the more competitive it is,
and the more content there is incorporating it.
This means it's going to be harder to gain visibility. Now,
does that mean you shouldn't use it? No,
but it does mean that you'll probably want to use it along with another hashtag
that is more specific with a smaller following.
You might notice that when we started searching this hashtag right here,
LinkedIn shows us similar results.
It's giving us related hashtags so that what we can do is go through these and
look for one with a smaller audience.
So let's try entrepreneur,
which surprisingly is much smaller than entrepreneurship. See,
not even 500,000.
And honestly we could even stand to go smaller than this. The smaller you go,
the likelier it is that you'll be found on that hashtag's page. Now,
obviously you don't want to use a hashtag that has two followers because that
means that no one's really interested in it.
Another way to get hashtag ideas is right within the post itself, you know,
a similar dropdown will appear. Here's an example. Let's say I start a post,
and we don't really care about the body of the post,
but let's say I type and put in the pound symbol.
And then I start putting blog. Okay, blogging, blogger,
bloggers community. So I can just insert it like that.
I typically use three to five hashtags per post,
and I'll make sure that I use a variety of small, medium, and large followings,
just so you're kind of getting the best of all worlds.
Do not pack in as many hashtags as LinkedIn will allow.
It looks spammy and unprofessional,
and it's going to be really bad for user experience,
meaning that people who are reading your posts. Bare in mind.
That when LinkedIn tells you how many people are following a hashtag,
that doesn't necessarily mean that that's how many people are going to see your
content. So let's say that the hashtag you use has a hundred thousand followers.
Does that mean that a hundred thousand followers are going to see that post? No.
There are still a ton of other variables at play here. For example,
when LinkedIn is looking at your posts, it's asking, "Okay,
is this post getting good engagement?" It wants to determine if people care
about your content.
So if LinkedIn notices that your post is getting a lot of engagement,
meaning likes, comments, and shares, it stops and it goes, "Oh, okay,
people care about this." And it will show that post to more people and more of
the type of people that you want to reach.
This means that to help your hashtags perform better,
it's in your best interest to help your posts get as much engagement as
possible. Honestly, this is something that you want to be doing anyway,
but it's just one more thing that will help boost the power that your hashtags
hold. There are a lot of ways to improve engagement.
One surefire way is to tag people in the post itself or in a comment.
Only tag people who it makes sense to tag.
Do not spam a bunch of people. Instead,
choose a few people who you think would be particularly interested in seeing
that post, tag them in it, and invite them to join the conversation.
One of my students in Revenue Spark, Johan, he's really good about this.
So he'll create a post and he'll tag usually a few people within the first
comment and I'll always get the notification.
And I always go to the post and it's always something I'm interested in,
because he wouldn't tag me otherwise. And I'll respond.
This boosts the engagement of that post, which offers a number of benefits,
one of which being that his hashtags are going to be more powerful. Next,
I want to talk about branded hashtags.
Branded hashtags are tags that are hyper-specific and directly reflect
you or your company or a product or service that you sell. For example,
if I mentioned my program in a post, Revenue Spark,
I will use the hashtag #RevenueSpark.
It's not because I'm expecting it to bring me a ton of traffic,
because at this point it won't. But remember what I said earlier.
LinkedIn uses hashtags to categorize the content,
all of the content that uses that hashtag.
So if I'm continuously using the hashtag #RevenueSpark when applicable,
the hashtag #RevenueSpark is going to get its own little page on LinkedIn.
And anytime anyone clicks that hashtag,
they're going to go to its page and see all of my content.
You can even use this to your advantage by telling your followers or
connections, "Hey,
go check out this page to get tons of information about my course," or whatever
your brand, your services, whatever the hashtag reflects.
I've used branded hashtags for a number of things, like my name. So #MeganGrant.
And also the other programs that I offer,
like The 7-Day Secret and How to Blog Like a Pro.
When you're picking a branded hashtag,
first thing you want to do is make sure that it's not something that a ton of
people are already using. If they're using it here and there, that's okay,
but we want to stay away from anything super popular because it kind of defeats
the purpose. Remember, when people go to that hashtag's page,
ideally' they see only your content. Again,
be sure that you're using it consistently, only when it's applicable,
but you want to really be building up the content with that hashtag.
Hashtags are an amazing tool that people really don't utilize to their full
potential.
And if you spend just a few minutes looking into hashtags that are relevant to
your business, you're going to see your post engagement go up.
Don't just barf up whatever random hashtags you can think of, though.
Look at their audiences, look at what kind of traffic,
what kind of activity they're getting. See what kinds of followings they have.
Always include a little bit of variety,
and make sure that they're relevant to the content within that post.
I mentioned in the beginning of this video that I use LinkedIn almost on a daily
basis to help me connect with new leads and land new clients.
If you want to learn more about that process,
be sure to check out my mini-course, The 7-Day Secret.
It's built to be quickly consumed and easily digested,
and to help you start seeing results with your client acquisition in one week.
I've included the link for this below. Yes, it is a paid mini-course. It's $37.
Thanks for sticking around. If you made it this far,
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