Postbag.
Hanne Møller – reposting your own post
Caryn Yuen – hashtags
I know LinkedIn has removed the ability to follow hashtags, but people can still use them. Some include hashtags within the body of their post to draw attention to certain words, while others add several at the end in a more Instagram-style approach. So what purpose do hashtags actually serve on LinkedIn now?
- Where do I start?
- What do I post about?
- Should I post personal stuff?
- How do I approach people?
- Do I need LinkedIn Premium?
- Should I switch to creator mode?
- How do I increase my Social Selling Index (SSI)?
- Should I put links in posts?
- Do I need a company page?
- How do I get more engagement and visibility?
Full transcript.
It’s a new year and we’re back with the independent podcast all about LinkedIn best practice. It’s Informed, episode 473. Hi, everyone. I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast. And we’re back for the start of a new year, 2026, and I can say to you, Happy New Year, and I’ve done a little post about that. I do one of these at the start of every year about when to say Happy New Year. It’s a little bit of engagement bait, to be honest with you, but it’s a bit of fun. Always gets people talking. When should you say Happy New Year? Check out the post that’s linked in the show notes.
Anyway, let’s get on with our usual section. It’s the Postbag with your listeners’ questions. Let’s go.
First question this week is from Hanne Møller and she has sent us a voice note. So, let’s listen to Hanne now.
Hi, John. I’d love to hear your comment on when people repost. And I’m thinking about not reposting other people’s post, but reposting your own post.
I see a lot of people doing that and I know they do it because they say they get you contacts to see it that they’re not connected with. But I must say I don’t like it because people you are already connected with get a notification saying there’s new posts from this person.
Then you go and check it out and you see, oh, it’s just a repost of what you did two days ago. So, that’s why I don’t like it. But I’d love to hear your view on that one. So, maybe that’s an episode for 2026. Happy New Year.
Well, thank you for the question, Hanne, and thank you for being a dedicated listener of the show since I took it over. Yeah, I’m in agreement with you. I don’t really do reposts at all unless I’m adding some thoughts and reposting a public post into my private Espresso+ group. And even then I don’t do that very often, so reposts aren’t really a thing for me, and certainly not to repost my own content.
I think that it looks a bit needy to me, so I’m not really a fan of doing that. I understand that some of the bigger content creators do it and they get some good results from it and they recommend it to others, but I think if you’ve got a smaller following, it might be seen as, like I say, a bit needy, so I wouldn’t necessarily do that.
You could potentially enhance your posts by adding further comments to the original, or maybe doing a new follow-up post that isn’t the same as the original, but just carries on from the same idea.
So, you can keep getting those thoughts out into public, but just hitting the repost button on something you’ve written yourself, like you say, could send a notification to someone who’s already seen that post before and that might just be annoying. So, on balance I would say don’t bother.
OK, the other question for this week comes from Caryn Yuen, who is asking about hashtags and she says: I know LinkedIn has removed the ability to follow hashtags, but people can still use them. Some include hashtags within the body of their post to draw attention to certain words, while others add several at the end in a more Instagram style approach. So, what purpose do hashtags actually serve on LinkedIn now?
Yes, fair question. LinkedIn themselves said that hashtags are in a kind of deprecated state on LinkedIn, so they do still work.
You know, you type a hashtag symbol before a word and it will still light up in blue in the post itself, but that won’t aid the discoverability of that post. So, if you’re trying to use hashtags to try to attract a new audience, it’s not going to work for that purpose.
Also, it used to be possible to see how many people followed a hashtag, and LinkedIn removed that last year, so you can’t use that as an indicator to work out what topics might be popular. But hashtags can still be useful if they’re used to reinforce a personal brand, or if they’re used to showcase a particular series of content.
I think that they do slightly add to the clutter that you see on the screen, and therefore, if it’s not essential to the message, I probably would leave them out.
And these days the only time I tend to see them myself is when they’re being used ironically for some kind of comic effect in a post, in which case you would put them at the end and hope they give someone a chuckle. But generally speaking, hashtags aren’t as powerful as they once were on LinkedIn, and frankly, they were never that powerful to begin with.
So, you might see old advice that says, you know, make sure you use a hashtag, make sure you use 3 to 5 hashtags per post, or now it’s optimal to use 8 hashtags or whatever. All that stuff is kind of out of date. Use one if you want to reinforce your personal brand, but generally speaking, you can leave them out of your posts.
OK, that’s it for the Postbag. But Caryn’s question did actually make me think of some of the common questions that I get asked on LinkedIn because people always ask about things like hashtags, and I looked back at an old article that I wrote I published as a newsletter in January 2023 of my top 10 questions that I got asked on LinkedIn at the time.
I thought it was a good time to update that article, so I’m going to link to that in the show notes here. And actually not much has changed since then, so I’ll quickly read out the topics that I covered in that piece. I’m not going to go into that in massive detail here because it’s all set out for you to read. But the 10 questions I’d listed were:
Where do I start?
What do I post about?
Should I post personal stuff?
How do I approach people?
Do I need LinkedIn Premium?
Should I switch to creator mode? That’s the one that really stands out for me because that creator mode isn’t a thing on LinkedIn anymore.
How do I increase my Social Selling Index score?
Should I put links in posts?
Do I need a company page?
How do I get more engagement and visibility?
So, I’ve gone through and re-updated that article so it’s fresh for 2026, so you can go and take a look at that.
It’s kind of interesting that not a lot have changed, you know, other than the creator mode thing, which just isn’t a feature anymore because LinkedIn has rolled those creator mode features into the main experience. So, there’s nothing to turn on or off really. Pretty much everything else is the same. My advice is the same.
Where do you start? You know, optimising your profile and what kind of stuff do you post about? Answering people’s questions as much as possible to showcase your skills, you know, how you approach people, whether you need LinkedIn Premium, whether you should put links in posts, company pages, visibility.
A lot of the advice is the same and that makes it interesting when you’re doing a podcast like this.
I did say, I think in my very first episode, that I feel as I’m going to say a lot of the same things over and over again and maybe it’ll be that drip-drip effect if you’re a regular listener, that finally the penny will drop, as we say in the UK, and you will get the point. You know you’ll listen to that thing that you’ve been told 20 times and maybe put it into action.
And maybe at the start of the year it’s a good time to give you those quite simple reminders about how to stand out on LinkedIn. So, I’d be interested to know what you think of that post if you go and take a look.
And by all means, you know, if you have any other questions, please by all means ask me, either in the direct messages just for a one on one conversation, or it might be something that is of interest to the whole Informed community, in which case, you know, we can put it on the podcast and answer it there. But yeah, not a lot has changed in the past 3 years.
There’s lots of new features on LinkedIn, but not necessarily a change in approach in a lot of ways. So, I’ll leave you to read that article and ponder how you’re going to proceed with LinkedIn.
What we’ve said in recent times is that commenting is more important than ever. I think I’ve said that probably in every episode. It’s a really good way of being seen.
So, if you want a simple strategy for getting your name out into the marketplace in 2026, then I would probably start with commenting more often than you currently are and looking for relevant posts on which to comment where you can actually showcase a bit of personality, but a bit of knowledge about your subject matter so that you can hopefully attract the kind of people who would want to work with you.
Anyway, as it is still early in the year, I’m still kind of in holiday mode. I’ll be back to it properly next week, so I’m going to keep this really short for today, but the podcast is back. Thank you for listening for the last 6 or so episodes that I’ve done since taking over the show, and I’ll see you all again next week.
Take it easy.
