Did you know the technical term for a hashtag is an octothorpe? That’s exactly the kind of nerdy content that goes over well on LinkedIn, the world’s largest social media platform for professionals. (Professional nerdsss.)

Over 830 million users search and apply for jobs, join groups, and share business news on LinkedIn. Connection is the core purpose of LinkedIn, whether you’re building your personal network or marketing your business. Adding relevant hashtags to your LinkedIn posts helps people find you and drives those connections.

But which hashtags do you use? How many per post? How else can you use hashtags, besides in content, to find fellow professional peeps?

Go from #clueless to #confident with this complete guide to using LinkedIn hashtags, including the top tags to use in 2022.

What are LinkedIn hashtags?

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 cover why you should capitalize each word later on.)

How do LinkedIn hashtags work? They act as labels for your content and bring in more views, clicks, and connections. Clicking on a hashtag brings up all posts on LinkedIn sharing that tag. Users can also search for a hashtag in LinkedIn’s search bar.

20+ top LinkedIn hashtags in 2022

Popular hashtags change frequently and most are industry-specific, but here are the top LinkedIn hashtags by follower count in 2022.

1. #India – 67.6 million
2. #Innovation – 38.8 million
3. #Management – 36 million
4. #HumanResources – 33.2 million
5. #DigitalMarketing – 27.4 million
6. #Technology – 26.4 million
7. #Creativity – 25.2 million
8. #Future – 24.6 million
9. #Futurism – 23.5 million
10. #Entrepreneurship – 22.7 million
11. #Careers – 22.5 million
12. #Markets – 22.2 million
13. #Startups – 21.2 million
14. #Marketing – 20.3 million
15. #SocialMedia – 19.7 million
16. #VentureCapital – 19.3 million
17. #SocialNetworking – 19 million
18. #LeanStartups – 19 million
19. #Economy – 18.7 million
20. #Economics – 18 million

Why use hashtags on LinkedIn?

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 (like #HootsuiteLife).
• Promote your events or products.

Getting eyeballs on your content is half the battle for social media marketers. Hashtags help you do that. But it’s not all they do.

Get noticed

Most people are on LinkedIn to connect with peers or hunt for their next job (or both). LinkedIn hashtags are the best way to put up your bat signal and get noticed for your content, whether your goal is to build a personal network, gain followers for your company page, or recruit talent.

Creating posts with trending hashtags on LinkedIn is a good idea because it can earn you a ton of views if your content goes viral. However, be careful jumping on trends. Ensure it fits your brand and content strategy and makes sense for you to post. If not, skip it and wait for a popular trend that suits your brand.

Better yet, stay ahead of the trends with our free Social Trends 2022 report. Create winning content right now and know where social media is going over the next few years.

Research your audience

Find out what your audience wants by following hashtags about topics they’re interested in. Which hashtags are they using? Which hashtags are your competitors using?

Following hashtags is an easy, and free, way to get first-hand knowledge about your target audience and keep your competitive research up-to-date.

I cover how to do this later on, 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 “hashtaggable” content you can publish on LinkedIn:

• A post, which can be text, or have photos, video, a document, or other media attached.
• An article, meant for long-form pieces and functions as a sort of mini-blog. These are most often used on personal profiles for thought leadership pieces.

You can also start a newsletter or publish an audio event, but this article focuses on using hashtags to get more views on your posts and articles.

Add a hashtag to a LinkedIn post

Click Start a post at the top of LinkedIn’s homepage and type your post, then click Add hashtag in LinkedIn’s post editor. It simply places a # in your post, so you could also type # by yourself which is way faster…

As you type your hashtag, LinkedIn will suggest some popular options for you.

There’s an even easier way than this, though: Scheduling your LinkedIn posts, and all your other social content, with Hootsuite. Write individual posts or use bulk scheduling to schedule weeks’ worth of posts in minutes. Plus, always know when your best time to post is with powerful analytics and growth tools.

Watch this 2 minute video to find out how you can save hours every week:

Add a hashtag to a LinkedIn article

From the homepage, click Write article. You can write hashtags in your article as text and once you publish it, they’ll turn into clickable hashtags.

Add hashtags to your LinkedIn company page

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 on Hashtags.

Choose up to 3 that represent what you do and what you post about, keeping in mind to choose hashtags your target audience is searching for, too.

Brand new page or been a while since you’ve updated it? Check out more quick ways to optimize your LinkedIn company page.

Add hashtags to your personal LinkedIn profile

To add hashtags to your personal profile, you first need to turn on LinkedIn’s Creator mode. Go to your profile and scroll down to the Resources section, located under the headline and analytics sections. Click on Creator mode.

Turn Creator mode on, then you’ll be able to add up to 5 hashtags (as well as have access to LinkedIn Live posts, audio events, and the newsletters feature).

It’s a quick thing to do and can make a difference for building your network. On the My Network page, LinkedIn recommends posts, people, groups, and more to you based on your activity and hashtags you follow.

This is where these tags come in—showing you as a recommendation to other users for the hashtags you’ve picked (shown as “Talks about ____”). While this isn’t a growth strategy on its own, it can consistently bring in new connections.

How to follow hashtags on LinkedIn

When you follow LinkedIn hashtags, your homepage feed will show you more posts containing and relating 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 a hashtag brings up all the LinkedIn content that also uses that tag. Or, you can search for a hashtag in the search bar, then click on the Posts tab.

Click on a hashtag, then click the Follow button. Voila—now you’ll see new posts using that tag in your feed and it’ll appear in your followed hashtags list.

Yes, using the right LinkedIn hashtags helps you get views. But it can also help you build connections.

Everyone should follow at least a few hashtags on LinkedIn, relevant to your industry. Make a habit of scrolling through posts and leaving insightful comments on 3 of them at least once a week. Not trying to sell anything or promote yourself—just offer a thoughtful opinion or helpful advice.

For company pages, do the same thing, although try to focus on customers or experts talking about big topics in your industry. Take a stand on a poll or debate, leave a comment, or thank someone for sharing a product review.

Make it a goal to use hashtags to create 3 proactive connections per week as part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Best practices for using LinkedIn hashtags

Capitalize each word

For hashtags consisting of multiple words, it’s best to capitalize the first letter of each word. So instead of writing #socialforgood, write #SocialForGood.

Capitalization makes it easier to read for everyone, but most importantly, it’s more accessible. Blind and visually impaired people use screen readers to read web content out loud. When it comes to hashtags, screen readers rely on capitalization to identify each word in the hashtag and read it aloud accurately.

Place hashtags at the end of your post

Don’t bury your lede, bury your hashtags. Depending on the length of your post, LinkedIn only shows a line or two of it in users’ home feeds.

Where you put hashtags in posts doesn’t influence the algorithm, so placing them at the top won’t make it appear more often. In fact, it would probably hurt your reach since you should be trying to capture attention with your main point right away.

Use both general and niche hashtags in each post

LinkedIn recommends using only 3 hashtags per post, but there isn’t a limit. If you add 10, your post will still show up for all 10 hashtags. LinkedIn’s recommendation is probably based more on aesthetics and not wanting people to jam 100 hashtags into each post, cluttering up users’ home feeds.

So while you don’t need to feel limited to 3, don’t overdo it and look spammy, either.

For each post, choose 1 or 2 general hashtags and 1 or 2 very specific hashtags. Why? This gives you the best chance of the right audience seeing your post: Those interested in your overall topic, and those who share your unique viewpoint or specific interest within that topic.

Here’s what that looks like.

This post below is for a specific audience: Social media managers. And, even more specifically, ones who are looking to save time or be more productive.

Knowing that, I can easily choose a few general hashtags I know social media managers follow, such as #SocialMediaMarketing and #SocialMedia. But how do I target my fellow nerdy lil’ productivity hackers out there?

Enter: LinkedIn’s search tab. For this, I want to find a hashtag about productivity with a decent number of followers.

Typing in #productivity brings up the most popular tags. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to see all those hashtags ranked by popularity within LinkedIn—but check the end of this article for 2022’s top tags and recommended tools to make this easier.

After clicking on a few hashtags I think are a good fit, I compare how many followers each one has.

You don’t always need to choose the one with the most followers. In fact, that may not be specific enough. Here, #productivity has over 8 million followers. For my post, that’s a general hashtag and 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 could always be a rebel and use both #SocialMediaManager and #Productivity if you’re feelin’ spicy.

Schedule your LinkedIn posts, manage your page, find hashtags, and engage with your audience from one dashboard, right alongside all your other accounts across social networks. Do it all and measure it all with Hootsuite’s powerful planning and analytics tools. Try it free today.

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