Today’s Tip Tuesday is part three of a four-part series on hashtags. Last week, we talked about using hashtags on Facebook as part of your overall marketing strategy. This week we are covering the ins and outs of LinkedIn hashtags. But first, let’s review:
As we’ve learned over the past three weeks, hashtags can be used to help you find what you’re looking for on social media using keywords. These are powerful tools that, if used correctly, will help you connect to and engage with your target audience.
LinkedIn currently has 590 million users, and 260 million of those users are active on a monthly basis. It is the number one channel for B2B marketing, and it is a powerful lead generator for your business. Because LinkedIn is a social network designed specifically for professional use, rather than personal use, it drastically differs from other social networks. For instance, did you know that posts with video perform worse than posts without video on LinkedIn? That goes against the modern marketer’s mantra that video is always the best method on social media.
Because of key differences like that, LinkedIn needs to be thought of differently than your other platforms. All your hard work will be worth it, though, because 80% of B2B leads on social media come from LinkedIn:
So, how can you use hashtags to tap into those invaluable leads?
LinkedIn only recently added the hashtag feature, and they have been updating and advancing it since, making it incredibly intuitive and easy to use.
First, they’ve added a handy exploratory feature to the left-hand column of our feeds. This makes it easy to add and follow hashtags that interest you and keep you engaged in the conversations that are relevant to your professional goals. I use this tool to listen to the conversation around digital marketing to ensure I am up to date on what thought-leaders in my industry are saying:
For the sake of being thorough, let’s say I click on the #socialnetworking tag I follow. It takes me through to an entire feed of posts about this topic where I can get inspiration for posts of my own:
Hashtags are fantastic tools to help you find conversations, but in order to use these to your advantage, you have to actually join the conversation. Nobody likes that creepy guy who sits in the corner at the party, never saying anything. So, join the digital party and participate in the conversation. Show everyone you are interesting and worthy of being in that room. There’s also a chance that one conversation will start a new relationship that will help your business grow!
Please note, though, that you should only comment if you have something of value to add to the conversation. The only thing worse than being the creepy guy at a party is being the guy who is constantly inserting himself into a conversation with irrelevant comments. Like this:
Don’t do that. Also, no, I didn’t finish posting that comment.
After you’ve been #sociallistening and engaging with other thought-leaders, you might want to engage further in the conversation and create a post of your own. First, make sure your hashtags are relevant to your post and your audience. You also only want to use 5-6 tags that are highly engaging, any more than that and it looks spammy. I prefer to put hashtags at the bottom of my post, so they aren’t the first thing people see, but you can also put them within the text.
With that, you are ready to get started testing hashtags on your LinkedIn feed! Hopefully, these nifty little tools will help you capture your part of that 80 % of leads generated on LinkedIn. Just remember, when you try something new you have to test, track, and try again. If you need help with your LinkedIn hashtag strategy, give us a call! We’d love to help you take your business to the next level through digital marketing!
