Welcome to episode 273. This week I want to focus on two much misunderstood and at times, misused features. #Hashtags and @mention tagging.

I have talked about hashtags a fair bit over the last few months and I last covered @mentioning in episode 153 but I felt it was worth thoroughly going through my thoughts as well as thoughts from other LinkedIn experts John Espirian and Greg Cooper.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

The Jobs of Tomorrow: LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs Report

2020 Emerging Jobs Report | UK

All the other reports from around the world

Engineering blog – How we mapped the “skills genome” of emerging jobs

7 New Tools to Build Your Community and Grow Your Career on LinkedIn (only one is new to us!)

Hashtags # and @mention tagging

Hashtags

Three types of #

1. Your own personal hashtag that allows a viewer of one post to quickly access your other posts. John Espirian uses his #BitmoJohn effectively
2. One that you create that could be used by others around a specific topic or event. Greg Cooper, for instance, uses #linkinedBristol which are mainly his posts but others could easily use that hashtag.
3. Official LinkedIn hashtags that can be followed, not just searched for. Many of these have millions of followers and using them increases the chance of your post being seen by your followers due to ‘double impact’ (they follow you and the #). You can find Andy Foote’s list of hot hashtags here

LinkedIn’s advice is to use up to 3 hashtags per post and my experience is that this works well.

I don’t think it aids the readability of a post to include hashtags in the main body of a post (as seen in Kevin’s post below), it’s far better to add them in a separate line at the bottom of a post.

Kevin’s post above is worth a read, it appears that LinkedIn are experimenting with post urls, including the hashtag words in the url…interesting move!

I believe that at least 2 of your 3 hashtags should be from the hot hashtags list (provided they are relevant) and the third could be your own hashtag or do what Scott Millard does and use hashtags as a way of adding humour to a post, this can also make it more ‘sticky’ and memorable.

@mention tagging

Firstly let me say that this is one of the most unreliable and glitchy features on LinkedIn, as a result, it can be very frustrating to use but it’s worth persisting as careful, considered tagging can really help the visibility of your post.

I would also advise against relying on notifications to occur as a result of tagging someone, they very often don’t know they have been tagged. If you want to tag someone then I would always advise sending the post to them as well.

This feature is often badly misused, ‘spam tagging’ is very annoying!

• Some people tag as many people as they can think of in a desperate attempt to get someone to comment on their post – not cool!
• @mentioning people in the comments is also not cool. When you are tagged in the main body of a post you are able to remove that tag (three dots, top right) and people should have the right to do that. Tagging someone in the comments is a ‘snide’ way to tag someone.

The best way to use @mention tagging is to create a table/spreadsheet that you can use every time you post.

1. Decide on your most important topics
2. Find at least 3 experts/thought leaders or someone you are sure will find that topic irresistible for each topic
3. Ensure these people are active commentators on posts
4. Ensure they also post on a fairly regular basis (thus allowing you to comment on their posts)

Never overdo it with any one person, getting consistently tagged in a post is annoying and will lead to them ignoring you. Never tag more than 3 people on each post (that should be hard to do anyway)

We had three contenders this week;

This one probably did well primarily because of the positive nature of the story more than anything but wow…what a story it is!

Jeri is one of my favourite posters on LinkedIn, better known for her videos but she also knows exactly how to deliver a great, highly engaging text only post.

Both the above posts would normally be worthy winners but they have been beaten this week by this brilliant, innovative video post from John Espirian.

That’s all for this week.

Get in touch if you have any questions, nominations for post of the week or any suggestions for the show.