When you think of social media, you may also associate it with hashtags. But are hashtags appropriate for LinkedIn, the social media platform for professionals? Hashtags are often the best way to increase the reach of your social media posting. The standard of ‘professionalism’ is changing and people are much more casual on LinkedIn than you would think.
Why You Should LinkedIn Hashtags
The biggest struggle in your affordable social media strategy is getting people to look at your content. Hashtags help increase the reach of your posts and find new followers (or connections). By including hashtags in your posts you:
- Find new people in your industry
- Increase your organic reach
- Build a community around your business
- Promote your products or services
Best Practices for LinkedIn Hashtags
Capitalize the first letter of each word. By capitalizing the first letter of each word, you make it easier for people to read the hashtag. For people who are blind or visually impaired, their screenreaders are able to recognize and separate the words by capitalized letters. Otherwise, it reads it aloud as one word.
Put hashtags at the end of your posts. Unlike Twitter, you shouldn’t embed the hashtags in your post, you should put them at the end. It makes the post easier to read and it looks much less cluttered. Twitter has a smaller character count than LinkedIn. Hashtags within the post don’t affect the algorithm but you should try to capture a user’s attention with your main point.
Use a variety of hashtags. A good rule of thumb is to include general and niche hashtags. The larger general hashtags will push your posts to a larger audience. This is ideal, but your post can also get lost in the sea of other posts using that hashtag. That is where the niche hashtags come in! These are used by much fewer people so your post is more likely to stand out. Try to use niche hashtags that have a couple of thousand posts at a minimum. If they are too small, no one will be looking for them.