One of the worst things you can do is just make up hashtags or choose them without doing research on them. Many smart business professionals do this for their companies and for their individual posts. This is reckless and a waste of time.

Every hashtag that you use should be researched in advance. Especially because you only have five hashtags in total to use. (And while you can use as many as you want, the LinkedIn algorithm prefers that you only use 3-5).

Yes there are tools out there that can help you find the right hashtags but I think the best tool is you. So that means taking terms and putting them into the search bar yourself.

If you don’t have the time to do this, hire someone who can. I happen to know somebody who’s pretty good at this (wink wink). You should keep a running list of hashtags and simply copy and paste them into your posts. But adjust them for the content at hand.

And there is a lot of strategy that goes into finding the right ones including finding the sweet spot of a hashtag’s followers. Believe it or not there is such a thing as having too many and too few followers for a hashtag.

As soon as I started using the right hashtags on my post as well as the post of my clients, my views and engagement levels went up significantly.

People really do follow hashtags on LinkedIn. And they sort content based on them. I hope that you have noticed that each of your company pages on LinkedIn can have three hashtags per page. Individuals can follow quite a number of hashtags as well. Take advantage of his tools and use hashtags to help you become more discoverable.

If you’re interested in learning more, there are resources on my blog about this topic.