Do Hashtags Work on LinkedIn.

Do hashtags work on LinkedIn?

In our study of 39,858 posts, no. Posts with no hashtags earned about 5% more reactions and comments than the typical post, and posts with one to three hashtags earned about 18% less.

If your posts still end in a row of tags, the numbers say drop them. The gap holds for both kinds of author we measured, and it is widest on comments.

How we measured it

We collected 74,119 public LinkedIn posts from 346 prominent writers on 10 September 2026, covering posts from 2014 to 2026. For the findings below we used the 39,858 posts from the 187 authors whose median post earns at least 100 reactions and comments.

Engagement here means reactions plus comments on a post. The typical post in that set, the one in the middle, earned 320. We grouped posts by how many hashtags they carried and compared the middle post of each group with that 320.

The figures show which posts did better, not why. A group can do well because of who tends to use it, so we treat each finding as a pattern worth testing, not a proven cause.

What the numbers say

• No hashtags: about 5% more reactions and comments than the typical post.
• One to three hashtags: about 18% fewer.
• More than three hashtags: about 16% fewer.

Most posts carried none. Of the 39,858 posts, 31,569 had no hashtags and 8,289 had at least one.

Adding a fourth or fifth tag did not rescue a post. The two hashtag groups landed almost level with each other, and both sat well below the post with none.

Comments fall furthest

Comments drop more than reactions do. On posts without hashtags, comments made up about 20% of all reactions and comments. On posts with hashtags, about 13%.

That matters because a comment is a reader choosing to join in. A post that collects reactions but little conversation is doing less for its author than the total suggests.

Measured against the size of each author’s following, the gap narrows but does not close. Per thousand followers, posts with hashtags came in about 6% below the typical post and posts without about 1% above.

Both kinds of author agree

We split the authors into two groups: 115 chosen for how they write, and 72 chosen because they work in social and marketing. In both groups, posts with no hashtags came in about 5% above the typical post.

One to three hashtags cost the first group about 22% and the social and marketing group about 12%. Different authors, same direction.

The strongest authors tag less

We also compared the 40 authors with the highest median engagement with 136 typical authors. The strongest put hashtags on 6% of their posts. The typical authors put them on 10%.

Neither group tags much. The ones who do best tag least.

Why the tag has stopped earning its place

Our data does not say why hashtags go with weaker posts, and we would not claim it does. What we can add is what LinkedIn has said about how its feed now works.

In March 2026 LinkedIn said its new feed ranking “better understands what a post is actually about and how it relates to a member’s evolving interests and career goals.” It said its retrieval, built on a large language model, can see that two topics are related where “traditional keyword-based systems might miss the connection.”

Our reading is that a hashtag is a keyword label, and a feed that reads the whole post has less need for one. That is our judgement, not something the study measured. It does fit the numbers: if the tag adds nothing the words do not already say, there is no reason to expect it to help.

What to do instead

Drop the hashtags. It is the plain reading of the data, and it costs nothing to test.

Then put the effort where the same study found posts doing better:

• Short first lines. A first line under 40 characters earned about 13% more than the typical post. One over 140 characters earned about 24% less.
• One tagged person or company. Posts tagging one earned about 12% more than the typical post. Tagging two or three came in about level with it.

Tag a person only when there is a reason to. The lift was for one tag, not a crowd.

And because LinkedIn says its feed reads what a post is about, say what the post is about in plain words in the post itself. The words now do the job the tag was meant to.

How to test it on your own account

In most teams hashtags are a habit, not a decision. They sit in the template, the scheduling tool or the approval checklist, and nobody removes them because nobody added them on purpose.

1. Take hashtags out of the template and the checklist for a month.
2. Keep everything else the same: the same authors, formats and posting times.
3. Compare the median reactions and comments per post with the month before, and look at comments on their own.
4. Keep the change if comments hold or rise.

How NBK thinks about hashtags

A hashtag rule is a small case of a bigger problem. Teams keep doing things because a guide once told them to, and nobody checks whether the habit still pays.

The fix is a system that tests its own defaults: a template that changes when the evidence does, and a review that asks what each line of a post is for. That is the work at the start of a social audit.

Next step

Take your last twenty LinkedIn posts and split them by whether they carried hashtags. If the tagged ones are not clearly ahead, drop the tags and spend the time on the first line.

The profile matters as much as the post, and the strongest profiles show it in their LinkedIn headlines.

If your team is posting regularly but still feels stuck, NBK can help find the constraint in the system.