Yes, and you should!

Great content deserves maximum exposure, and using relevant hashtags on your LinkedIn posts will boost your content and profile visibility.

Imagine each hashtag as a physical folder. When you create a LinkedIn post and place it in a ‘folder’ on LinkedIn, you make your content easier to locate and distribute to the right target audience.

This is very subjective, but we’ve learnt from research that the best hashtags are always the ones relevant to our niche or industry.

Here are some best practices to start:

• Always place hashtags at the end of your LinkedIn posts to improve readability
• Limit usage to 1-3 hashtags to avoid looking spammy and penalisation by the LinkedIn algorithm
• Use a mixture of general, niche and custom hashtags in each LinkedIn post
• Avoid spaces between words or special characters such as dashes and underscores

For more tips and strategies, read this.

Use LinkedIn Hashtag Analytics to determine a hashtag’s overall performance on LinkedIn.

Reach isn’t the only determinant of a good hashtag on LinkedIn.

You’ll also want to look at its like and comments count to determine its effectiveness.

Can using popular hashtags with millions of followers reach that number of people? The data from our free hashtag analytics tool reveals a grim reality.

A popular hashtag (e.g. #marketing) gives you a reach of over 20 million followers but only an average of 8 likes and 3 comments.

Here are 2 top reasons:

• High competition
  • Everyone is using the same hashtag because of its popularity. It’s like shooting for the moon.
• The market is too broad
  • Your content may be irrelevant to the majority of the hashtag followers

LinkedIn power users and influencers have their own unique LinkedIn hashtag strategy.

But if they have one thing in common, it’s that they don’t search for the top LinkedIn hashtags, take the top 30 and paste them into their LinkedIn post arbitrarily.

Why? It’s because they know that it doesn’t work that way on LinkedIn.

The top echelon of LinkedIn users knows that the number of LinkedIn hashtag followers doesn’t necessarily translate to high reach, and if you didn’t know that already, you do now!

Just imagine: If these top LinkedIn influencers with avid followers can’t get the best out of using popular hashtags, how would small-time business owners, marketers and entrepreneurs fare?

That’s why learning how many followers a LinkedIn hashtag has isn’t, and won’t ever be, sufficient. You need to look into more data to make the best call.