10 Easy Steps to LinkedIn Hashtag Analytics [2024]

Hashtags have become ubiquitous. The most popular ones exceeded one billion mentions a long time ago. But still, a lot of people – including professional marketers and social media managers – underestimate LinkedIn hashtags. What a waste! Let me show you how to level up your LinkedIn hashtag analytics.

Table of contents:

• How to start LinkedIn hashtag analytics?
• How to analyze hashtags on LinkedIn?
  • 01 Check the volume of mentions
  • 02 Measure social media reach
  • 03 Detect the hashtag popularity
  • 04 Detect the hashtag reputation
  • 05 Conduct sentiment analysis
  • 06 Track engagement
  • 07 Detect influencers using the hashtag
  • 08 Check related hashtags
  • 09 Compare to competitive hashtags
  • 10 Track the performance over time
• Conclusion

How to start LinkedIn hashtag analytics?

When you think about hashtags, I am sure LinkedIn is not the first social media platform that comes to your mind. Twitter threads with hashtags? Of course! Instagram Reels captions hashtags? Sure thing! LinkedIn posts and hashtags? Hmmm…

Take some good advice – don’t underestimate their power! Relevant and popular hashtags can leverage your LinkedIn presence.

The best hashtags boost your LinkedIn profile visibility and increase follower counts. Why?

Because they let users know which area you have expertise in. Which topics you cover the most. Cause, exactly like on other social platforms, hashtags categorize content to help LinkedIn users navigate through the ocean of data.

And, like on other social media, LinkedIn users can follow a specific hashtag to inform the LinkedIn algorithm about their content preferences.

After this short introduction to the mechanics and significance of LinkedIn hashtags, let’s jump to our main topic – LinkedIn hashtag analytics.

The great starting point for any kind of social media analytics is checking its native solutions. And – exactly like in the case of other social platforms – LinkedIn has its own tool.

Unfortunately, it turns out that there are no specific LinkedIn hashtag analytics tabs or features in it. What exactly can you do?

Well, you can type the particular hashtag, hit enter, and check some basic things. You can see posts with the relevant hashtag, people and companies who used it somewhere, as well as a few other options.

Anything else?

You can use some filters to narrow down the results by date, content type, and so on. Not so much, is it?

I’ll be brutally honest with you. Native LinkedIn hashtag analytics is more than basic. It’s elementary. And it provides you with almost no actionable insights.

If you’d like to get on with your LinkedIn hashtag strategy seriously, you must support your efforts with an appropriate third-party tool. Which one? It depends on your needs.

Are you planning to focus only on LinkedIn? Or do you want to do comprehensive social listening and analyze data from various sources?

You must answer (at least) these two questions to define your needs and choose the right media monitoring tool.

How to analyze hashtags on LinkedIn? 10 steps 

All right, I suppose that the first-case scenario – that LinkedIn is your only social media marketing channel – is extremely unlikely.

Therefore, let’s go through the hashtag analytics process with the help of some of Brand24’s features.

Remember, though – no matter which media monitoring tool you use, check the LinkedIn integration before you start tracking your hashtags. It might significantly impact your LinkedIn hashtag analytics results.

01 Check the volume of mentions

Start your LinkedIn hashtag analytics by checking the most basic indicator – the volume of mentions. Because most of hashtags are mentions preceded by a hashtag symbol.

Tracking mentions volume gives a lot of valuable insights. By analyzing the spikes and drops in a hashtag’s popularity, you can track your performance over time, find out if your content is relevant, and, if not – optimize it.

Besides, hashtag popularity can help you discover niche-related trends and your competitors’ LinkedIn hashtag strategy.

Hashtags distribution over time can also help you spot some patterns. For example, seasonal trends or weekly periods.

Below, you can see the distribution of the LinkedIn #Innovation in the case of volume. Can you see the pattern?

Right, the hashtag gains in popularity between Monday and Thursday while drops from Friday to Sunday. No surprise at all. Most people use weekends for leisure. Not to post career or job-related posts with hashtags on a professional social network.

Remember that some media monitoring tools like Brand24 allow you to track and analyze relevant hashtags published on all major social media platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, Quora, and Telegram).

After picking all mention sources, it turns out that in just 30 days, hashtag #Innovation was used over stunning 130,000 times!

The hashtag was most often used on Instagram, X, and TikTok. Again, we shouldn’t be surprised. In general, using hashtags on those platforms is still much more popular than on LinkedIn.

Analyzing such a volume and the reason for sudden spikes is quite demanding. Fortunately, Brand24 introduced the Anomaly Detector.

This AI-driven feature identifies unusual patterns in your tracked mentions. At the same time, the Detector analyzes possible causes and presents its conclusions in one or two sentences.

02 Measure social media reach

Social media reach is a second basic metric you should check.

It helps you find out how often your LinkedIn hashtag could appear on other people’s home feeds.

Similarly to the volume of mentions, LinkedIn monitoring of hashtag reach provides valuable data regarding your LinkedIn marketing performance. But it also serves one more specific purpose.

Namely, identifying niche influencers and establishing fruitful cooperation.

And when you reach the right influencers followed by your desired target audience, the sky is the limit… Ok, I’m exaggerating, but not so much!

Returning to our example, let’s focus on the green line on the chart.

As you can see, there is a huge spike in social media reach. But why? If it’s not correlated to the sudden increase in hashtag volume, what happened then?

Thanks to the Anomaly Detector, we know that three influential Tiktokers caused the spike. So, even if the volume of mentions was relatively stable, the cumulative reach of those three resulted in a rapid growth.

03 Detect the hashtag popularity

Okay, but can you identify your hashtag popularity at first glance?

Sure thing! That’s what Presence Score is for.

Presence Score is a metric that helps to measure the topic’s online popularity at a given time. It’s like a quick overview of your brand awareness performance.

Thanks to analyzing your hashtag Presence Score, you can evaluate your marketing & PR efforts. Especially if you want to check how your campaign or brand’s LinkedIn hashtags work.

With Presence Score, you can also benchmark your brand or campaign hashtags against your competitors.

Let’s check the popularity of Apple’s brand hashtag.

As you can see, #Apple has a 65 Presence Score, meaning it’s higher than 82% of brands. Frankly, I expected Apple’s presence to be much higher!

04 Detect the hashtag reputation

Reputation Score is another utterly useful metric for LinkedIn analytics. It indicates the trust and credibility related to a particular topic (hashtag). The Reputation Score is a result of sentiment analysis and the total reach of mentions.

Thanks to it, you can instantly evaluate LinkedIn users’ sentiment towards your brand or campaign. Therefore, this feature is more relevant to brand or campaign hashtags than the Presence Score.

As you can see below, #Apple has a 19 Reputation Score. It means people’s sentiment towards this tech tycoon is positive (Reputation Score operates on a scale from -100 to 100).

05 Conduct sentiment analysis

Speaking about sentiment, it’s time to introduce you to another metric you should consider in your LinkedIn hashtag analytics.

Understanding emotions and attitudes toward the chosen hashtag can be the clincher for your brand reputation management.

Sentiment analysis checks the tone of voice and emotions behind the particular mention with a tracked hashtag. Automated sentiment analysis saves a lot of priceless hours.

The Brand24 tool performs the context analysis of a post or a comment where someone used your tracked hashtag. The sentiment can be positive, neutral, or negative.

The general sentiment analytics towards #Apple shows that the primary source of positive feelings comes from Instagram. As for negative mentions, most of them are published on the X platform.

As for LinkedIn, my experience with that professional network proves that people are less keen on sharing their negative feedback. Especially since they’re not anonymous on LinkedIn.

06 Track engagement

Engagement is one of the most important metrics in social media. Basically, every element of your social media actions impacts it. Yes, hashtags too!

In short, engagement indicates the number of users that interacted with posts mentioning your hashtag. Such interactions are, above all, likes, comments, and shares.

So, in other words, social media engagement is a sign of how successful you are in capturing your audience’s interest and encouraging them to participate in discussions on a given topic.

And that’s extremely important. Social media algorithms judge the volume and type of interactions with your content. Based on that, they decide whether to show it to other users or not.

Besides, tracking engagement metrics allows you to identify trending hashtags (thus, topics) and gain insights into your competitors’ strategies by checking their current trending posts.

Equipped with knowledge about interactions, you can create more successful LinkedIn posts and make your hashtags effective.

07 Detect influencers using the hashtag

I believe there’s no need to convince you that wisely used, influencer marketing can skyrocket your brand awareness.

Briefly speaking, thanks to cooperation with niche-specific influencers, you can reach your message to new audiences. And hashtag analytics can be a massive shortcut to the whole process.

Hashtag research can help you identify top-notch influencers covering topics you’re interested. Similarly, you can discover a high-volume LinkedIn account mentioning your brand hashtags.

Visit the Analysis tab in the Brand24 tool and scroll down. On the left, you’ll see top public profiles talking about your hashtag. On the right, there are the most active public profiles that add hashtags you’re interested in.

You can also omit this general overview and directly go to the Influencers tab.

While there, you will see the most influential profiles talking about the chosen topic, a platform they use, how many times they mentioned your hashtag, their followers count, share of voice, influence, and their Influencer Scores.

Now, you’re ready to identify with who you should cooperate with.

08 Check related hashtags

Social listening tools like Brand24 allow finding LinkedIn hashtags related to your primary one. Why should you even bother?

Tracking related hashtags gives you a broader picture. You can discover trending hashtags in your niche and address these topics in your social media communication.

This knowledge also allows you to adjust your hashtag strategy by including less popular & niche-related hashtags. With them, you can target a more specific audience.

Anything else? Sure!

By discovering related topics, you can identify more industry-specific and relevant influencers.

Besides, they give you valuable insights into your competitor’s LinkedIn hashtags. You can see which brands are gaining your audience’s interest.

Going back to #Apple, we can see some competitors’ hashtags, general tech topics, and mentions of Apple’s top products.

09 Compare to competitive hashtag

We’re almost done with our LinkedIn hashtag analytics steps. Let’s check the two last metrics that give us valuable data about how our hashtag performs compared to our competitors.

The “Compare projects” feature informs you how successful your hashtag campaign is in your niche. And one of the ways to do it is by benchmarking with your direct opponent(s).

For example, I chose two popular hashtags from globally recognized sports brands, Nike and Adidas.

I compared Nike’s #JustDoIt with Adidas’ #ImpossibleIsNothing. Check the results first.

As you can see, Nike’s hashtag campaign is incomparably more successful than Adidas. Regarding volume, #JustDoIt was used 14 times more than #ImpossibleIsNothing.

Moreover, Nike’s monthly AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency) is worth $ 1.8 Million. It means you would have to spend almost $2 million to reach as many people as this hashtag does!

10 Track the performance over time

The second comparison metric and feature you can use to analyze your hashtag performance is “Compare periods”. Here, you compare your effectiveness – not with other campaigns, but over time.

This data lets you evaluate if your hashtag gains or loses popularity.

Now, let’s check #JustDoIt. I compared its performance in January 2024 to December 2023.

We can observe a 15% increase in mentions volume. Cool? Not exactly. Look closer.

Yeah, volume is higher, but there is a 43% drop in reach – from 153 to 87 million users!

It means that while more profiles are using #JustDoIt, they are much less influential than in the past. Why?

The reason is very simple, and we can find it in the chart below. It’s because of a special time of the year – Christmas. In just two days – December 24th and 25th – #JustDoIt reached to over 67 million people.

So, Nike’s marketing team can sleep well. Everything is under control.

Conclusion

LinkedIn hashtags can play a vital role in your general marketing strategy. They help to reach your LinkedIn posts to a wider audience, build your online reputation & expertise, create relevant content, and support your efforts in many other ways.

But you must know if your actions are right. To make data-driven decisions, you have to track and analyze proper metrics. Otherwise, you will be groping in the dark.

Native LinkedIn hashtag analytics is not enough. You need a reliable social media monitoring tool that will give you in-depth insights.

It will give you a priceless knowledge of what works, what doesn’t, and who you should cooperate with to move your LinkedIn hashtag strategy forward.

Besides, with a media monitoring tool, you can track your hashtag campaigns on various sources, automate time-consuming tasks, and generate insightful reports.

Final thoughts:

• When analyzing your LinkedIn hashtag campaigns, you must analyze various metrics (such as reach, engagement, sentiment, and so on) at the same time. Otherwise, the results of your analysis will be unreliable.
• LinkedIn native hashtag analytics tool provides only a selective set of data. You must use a media monitoring tool for more in-depth and actionable insights.
• Automated features save time on LinkedIn hashtag analytics.
• Tracking related hashtags allows you to find niche influencers and expand your LinkedIn reach to a broader audience.
• Comparing your hashtag campaign with your past performance gives you a lot of information about the success or failure of your actions.

Ready for serious LinkedIn hashtag analytics? Click here to try it for free!