LinkedIn Company Hashtags: The Complete Guide to Maximizing Your B2B Visibility

LinkedIn company hashtags have become a strategic lever for improving your visibility with qualified prospects. But since late 2026, LinkedIn transformed these hashtags into “Specialisms,” fundamentally changing how company pages optimize their discoverability.

If you manage a LinkedIn company page and want to generate more B2B leads, understanding this shift and knowing how to leverage it is now essential. This guide explains everything: what company hashtags are, how to use them strategically, and most importantly, how to automatically find them to analyze competitors or enrich your databases.

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What Are LinkedIn Company Hashtags and Why Did They Change?

Defining LinkedIn Hashtags

LinkedIn hashtags are keywords preceded by the # symbol that categorize your content on the platform. They work as thematic tags that allow users to discover your posts even if they’re not part of your direct network.

For instance, when Sarah, a marketing manager at a SaaS startup, publishes a post with #MarketingAutomation, that content becomes discoverable by all professionals who follow that hashtag or search for that topic on LinkedIn.

The Big Change of Late 2026: From Hashtags to Specialisms

In late 2026, LinkedIn made a major transformation: company page hashtags were replaced by “Specialisms.” This evolution reflects a strategic shift in LinkedIn’s algorithm, which now prioritizes keywords and semantic relevance over simple hashtag following.

What changed:

• Hashtags can no longer be directly added to your company page
• You can’t follow hashtags from your profile anymore
• Hashtags disappeared from search bar suggestions
• Instead, LinkedIn lets you add up to 20 “Specialisms” that work as keywords

What stayed the same:

• You can still use hashtags in your posts
• Hashtags remain clickable and searchable
• Posts with hashtags still generate more engagement (up to 30% more according to studies)

Why This Change Matters for B2B Companies

According to a Buffer study published in January 2026, LinkedIn shows an average engagement rate of 6.50%, constantly increasing since 2026. More importantly, 40% of LinkedIn users interact with company pages every week, making it a major channel for B2B lead generation.

For Alex, a Sales Ops Manager at a tech scale-up, understanding these changes means optimizing his company page to be found by the right decision-makers at the right time. Specialisms become strategic signals sent to LinkedIn’s algorithm to categorize your expertise and position you in the right conversations.

How Specialisms (Former Hashtags) Work on LinkedIn Company Pages

Where to Find Specialisms on Your Page

To access your company page Specialisms:

1. Log into your LinkedIn company page
2. Click the “Edit page” pencil icon
3. Select “Details” from the sidebar menu
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page
5. You’ll find the “Specialisms” section

Important: This section doesn’t display the # symbol before terms, but it works exactly like former hashtags. Your specialisms help your page appear in relevant searches and be discovered by your target audience. To dive deeper into optimizing your LinkedIn presence, check out our complete guide to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

How Specialisms Work in LinkedIn’s Algorithm

Specialisms act as semantic markers for LinkedIn’s algorithm. Here’s how they influence your visibility:

1. Expertise Categorization When you add “social media marketing,” “brand design,” or “data enrichment” as specialisms, LinkedIn understands your business domain and can suggest you in corresponding searches.

2. Search Results Appearance A user searching for “data enrichment tools” will potentially see your page if you’ve added “data enrichment” in your specialisms, even if they’re not connected to your network.

3. Algorithmic Recommendations LinkedIn uses your specialisms to recommend your content to users interested in these topics, even if you don’t necessarily use these terms as hashtags in your posts.

Technical Limitations to Know

20 Specialisms Maximum: Unlike hashtags in posts, you’re limited to 20 specialisms per page. You need to choose them strategically.

No # Symbol Required: In the Specialisms section, you simply write the term without #. LinkedIn handles the association automatically.

Instant Modification: Unlike your page’s historical hashtags that were fixed, you can modify your specialisms anytime to adjust your strategy.

Why LinkedIn Hashtags Remain Essential for Your B2B Strategy

Despite the shift to Specialisms for company pages, hashtags remain a powerful tool in your LinkedIn publications. Here’s why they’re still indispensable in 2026.

Measurable Impact on Engagement

According to recent LinkedIn engagement research, posts containing hashtags receive up to 30% additional engagement compared to posts without hashtags. This difference is explained by increased discoverability among a qualified audience.

Emily, a Growth Marketer at a lead generation agency, found that her posts using a strategic combination of broad (#Marketing) and niche (#B2BLeadGen) hashtags consistently generate 40% more views than posts without hashtags.

Hashtags as a Competitive Intelligence Tool

An often overlooked use of hashtags: analyzing your competitors’ content strategy. By identifying which hashtags your competitors use on their page and in their posts, you can:

• Discover topics they consider strategic
• Identify market niches they’re targeting
• Analyze their marketing positioning
• Spot active LinkedIn communities in your sector

Jessica, Head of Marketing at a fintech startup, regularly uses this method to benchmark her content strategy against her 10 main competitors. She discovered that several competitors were positioning themselves on #OpenBanking, a hashtag she’d neglected that generates 250,000 qualified followers.

Visibility Beyond Your Direct Network

LinkedIn has over 1.1 billion users in 2026. Without hashtags, your content remains primarily visible to your first and second-degree network. With relevant hashtags, you become discoverable by any professional searching for those topics.

Mike, an SDR at a B2B software company, tripled his LinkedIn visibility by systematically incorporating 3 targeted hashtags in his posts: a broad hashtag (#SalesProspecting), a niche hashtag (#B2BSaaSGrowth), and a brand hashtag (#TechForSales). Result: 60% of his new connections now come from people outside his initial network.

How to Find a Company’s Hashtags on LinkedIn: Methods and Tools

Identifying hashtags a company uses can provide valuable insights into their content strategy and positioning. Let’s see how to proceed effectively.

Manual Method: Direct Page Analysis

Step 1: Access the Company Page Go to the LinkedIn page of the company you want to analyze. Scroll to the “About” section of the page.

Step 2: Identify Specialisms Under the company’s general information, you’ll find “Specialisms” listed. These are the equivalents of former page hashtags.

Step 3: Analyze Recent Posts Browse through the company’s recent publications. Hashtags used typically appear at the end of posts and are clickable. Note the hashtags that recur most frequently.

Limitations of this method:

• Time-consuming if analyzing multiple competitors
• Impossible to scale (20+ companies)
• No historical hashtag data
• Unstructured data, difficult to analyze

To go deeper into LinkedIn data extraction techniques, check out our comparison of the 10 best LinkedIn scraping tools.

Automated Method: Extraction with Derrick

For marketing teams, sales ops, or growth marketers who need to regularly analyze dozens or hundreds of companies, manual extraction quickly becomes impossible. That’s where automation comes in.

Derrick offers several workflows to automatically extract a company’s LinkedIn hashtags, directly into Google Sheets.

Available workflows:

To dive deeper into using Sales Navigator for prospecting, check out our complete LinkedIn Sales Navigator guide.

Real-world usage example:

Mark, a Growth Marketer at an agency, needs to analyze the content strategy of 50 competing SaaS companies. Here’s his workflow with Derrick:

1. He compiles the list of 50 companies in Google Sheets (name or LinkedIn URL)
2. He launches the “Find Company Hashtags by Company Name” workflow
3. Within minutes, Derrick automatically enriches his sheet with each company’s hashtags
4. Mark analyzes the most used hashtags to identify trending topics
5. He adapts his own hashtag strategy accordingly

This workflow saves him approximately 5 hours of manual research and gives him a data-driven market overview. To discover all available enrichment workflows, explore our complete catalog of Derrick workflows.

Competitor Hashtag Analysis: What to Look For

Once you’ve collected your data, here’s how to leverage it strategically:

1. High-Potential Niche Hashtag Identification Look for hashtags used by multiple competitors but with less than 100,000 followers. These are often highly engaged niches where you can position yourself effectively.

2. Trending Hashtag Detection If multiple competitors simultaneously start using a new hashtag, it’s a signal of an emerging trend in your sector.

3. Sector Community Mapping Hashtags reveal LinkedIn communities where your competitors are active. Joining these conversations can give you access to qualified prospects.

4. Positioning Benchmarking Hashtag analysis shows how your competitors position themselves. Do they use more technical (#DataScience) or business (#DigitalTransformation) hashtags? This reveals their target audience. This approach fits into a broader B2B data enrichment strategy to better understand your market.

Best Practices for Using Hashtags on Your LinkedIn Company Page

Now that you understand how hashtags work and how to analyze competitors’, let’s move to optimizing your own strategy.

Choosing Your 20 Specialisms Strategically

With a limit of 20 specialisms per company page, every choice counts. Here’s an effective selection matrix:

1. Industry Specialisms (5-7 terms) Define your industry clearly and comprehensively.

• Tech example: “SaaS”, “cloud computing”, “data analytics”, “artificial intelligence”
• Marketing example: “digital marketing”, “content marketing”, “marketing automation”

2. Service/Product Specialisms (5-7 terms) Describe precisely what you offer.

• Example: “lead generation”, “data enrichment”, “sales prospecting”, “CRM integration”

3. Target Market Specialisms (3-5 terms) Indicate who you’re addressing.

• Example: “B2B”, “enterprise software”, “SMB solutions”, “sales teams”

4. Trending/Differentiating Specialisms (3-5 terms) Position yourself on emerging niches or your competitive advantages.

• Example: “no-code tools”, “GDPR compliance”, “AI-powered automation”

Hashtag Strategy in Your Posts: The Winning Mix

For your regular LinkedIn publications, LinkedIn’s official recommendation is to use between 3 and 5 hashtags per post. More than that risks diluting your message and appearing spammy.

The 3-1 Formula (recommended):

• 2 broad hashtags (large audience): #Marketing, #Sales
• 1 niche hashtag (qualified audience): #B2BLeadGen
• 1 brand hashtag (optional): #YourCompany

Example applied to Derrick: A Derrick post about data enrichment could use:

• #DataEnrichment (broad, 180K followers)
• #SalesProspecting (broad, 95K followers)
• #GoogleSheetsTips (niche, 12K followers)
• #DerrickApp (brand)

This combination maximizes both reach (broad hashtags) and relevance (niche hashtags).

Where to Place Your Hashtags in a Post

End-of-Post Placement (recommended): This approach keeps your main message clear and professional. Hashtags appear after your content, without interrupting reading.

We just launched our new LinkedIn enrichment feature!
Now get 50+ attributes per contact in one click.

#DataEnrichment #LinkedInProspecting #SalesAutomation

Text-Integrated Placement: You can also integrate hashtags naturally into your sentences, particularly useful for trending hashtags.

#ArtificialIntelligence is revolutionizing B2B prospecting.
Here's how we use it to automatically qualify your leads.

Golden Rule: Whatever your approach, use Pascal case (#DigitalMarketing rather than #digitalmarketing) to improve readability and accessibility for screen readers.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Using Overly Generic Hashtags ❌ #Business, #Success, #Marketing (too broad, content drowns) ✅ #B2BMarketing, #SaaSGrowth, #LeadGeneration (targeted, qualified audience)

Mistake 2: Repeating the Same Hashtags Without Analysis Rachel, a Social Media Manager, systematically used the same 3 hashtags on all her posts for 6 months. Analyzing her performance, she discovered 2 of those hashtags generated less than 5% of her views. Replacing them with more relevant hashtags identified through competitor analysis, she increased her reach by 45%.

Mistake 3: Neglecting Niche Hashtags in Favor of Big Hashtags Hashtags with millions of followers potentially generate more views, but your content disappears within minutes. Niche hashtags (10K-100K followers) offer better engagement rates because the audience is more targeted and active.

Mistake 4: Never Testing or Adjusting Treat your hashtags as continuous experimentation. Test different combinations, track performance in LinkedIn Analytics, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

How to Analyze Your Hashtag Performance and Optimize Your Strategy

Using hashtags is just a first step. To truly optimize your LinkedIn visibility, you need to measure, analyze, and adjust continuously.

Using LinkedIn Analytics for Company Pages

LinkedIn provides native analytics for company pages that give you valuable insights into your hashtags.

To access them:

1. Go to your company page
2. Click “Analytics” at the top
3. Select the “Content” tab
4. Analyze individual posts to see their performance

Key metrics to track:

Impressions: How many times your post was viewed. An effective hashtag significantly increases this number by exposing your content beyond your immediate network.

Engagement Rate: The percentage of people who interacted (like, comment, share) relative to impressions. A high engagement rate (> 3%) with a hashtag indicates excellent fit with your audience.

Clicks: How many people clicked on your post to learn more. Hashtags that generate many impressions but few clicks likely target the wrong audience.

Visitor Demographics: LinkedIn shows you who visits your page. If your hashtags attract unqualified profiles (wrong sector, wrong seniority), adjust them.

Identifying Your Best-Performing Hashtags

Post-by-Post Tracking Method:

Create a tracking table in Google Sheets with:

• Post date
• Hashtags used
• Impressions
• Engagement
• Clicks
• Engagement rate (engagement / impressions)

After 20-30 posts, analyze:

• Which hashtags recur most often in your top 10 performing posts?
• Are there hashtags that consistently generate more engagement?
• Do certain hashtags attract better quality traffic (measurable via qualified connection requests or messages)?

Real example:

John, content manager at a SaaS platform, discovered that #ProductivityTools generated 3x more engagement than #SaaS, even with similar audience. By replacing #SaaS with #ProductivityTools in his strategy, he increased his average engagement by 62% in 3 months.

External Tools to Go Further

Beyond LinkedIn native analytics, several tools enable deeper analysis:

Hootsuite: Content planning with AI hashtag suggestions and multi-post analytics

Sprout Social: Comparative hashtag analysis and performance tracking over time

Brand24: Real-time hashtag monitoring and anomaly detection in mentions

These paid tools are particularly suitable for marketing teams managing multiple company pages or requiring regular client reports.

LinkedIn Hashtags and GDPR: What You Need to Know

When collecting and analyzing company LinkedIn hashtags, you must remain aware of the legal framework, particularly in Europe with GDPR.

What’s Permitted

Public Data Analysis: Hashtags visible on company pages and in public LinkedIn posts are public data. You can collect and analyze them without GDPR compliance issues.

B2B Database Enrichment: If you use a tool like Derrick to find company hashtags via their contact email, you remain within “business data processing for B2B purposes,” authorized by GDPR under legitimate interest.

Precautions to Take

Limited Retention: Don’t store collected hashtags indefinitely. Define a relevant retention period (for example 12 months for competitive analysis).

Clear Purpose: Collect hashtags for a specific purpose (competitive intelligence, optimizing your own strategy) and don’t use this data for other purposes.

Data Security: If you centralize this data in a spreadsheet or database, ensure it’s secured and accessible only to authorized people.

No Sensitive Personal Data: Focus on hashtags and company data. Avoid crossing this information with sensitive personal data of individuals.

In practice, for most B2B marketing uses (content strategy analysis, sector trend identification, optimizing your own page), using company hashtags poses no GDPR compliance issues. Just keep these best practice principles in mind.

Advanced Strategies: Creating and Promoting Your Own Brand Hashtags

Beyond using existing hashtags, creating your own brand hashtags can become a powerful lever for visibility and tracking.

When to Create a Brand Hashtag

For a Specific Marketing Campaign Launching a new product, webinar series, or event? Create a dedicated hashtag to group all related content.

Example: #DerrickAIWeek for a week of AI-in-prospecting content.

To Unite Your Community A brand hashtag allows your customers, partners, and ambassadors to share their experiences and create user-generated content.

Example: Laura, founder of an automation platform, created #GrowWithAutomation. Her customers use it to share their results, creating a snowball effect of social proof.

To Track Your Thought Leadership Content If you regularly publish educational content, a proprietary hashtag facilitates archiving and discovery.

Example: #SalesInsightsWeekly for a weekly LinkedIn newsletter.

How to Promote Your Brand Hashtag

Step 1: Use It Consistently Add your brand hashtag to ALL your company posts for at least 3 months to create a habit.

Step 2: Encourage Your Employees to Use It Employee advocacy is the best amplifier. Ask your colleagues to include the hashtag when talking about the company or sharing your content.

Step 3: Incentivize Your Community In your posts, explicitly invite your audience to use the hashtag:

“Using Derrick? Share your results with #DerrickWins!”

Step 4: Create a Mini Content Hub LinkedIn lets you see all posts containing a specific hashtag via URL: linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/[your-hashtag]

Share this link in your communications (newsletter, email signature) so people discover the entire conversation around your brand.

Measuring Your Brand Hashtag ROI

Tracking metrics:

• Number of posts using your hashtag (monthly evolution)
• Number of unique users who used it
• Average engagement on posts containing the hashtag
• Total impressions generated by the hashtag

Chris, Growth Lead at a fast-growing startup, launched #B2BGrowthHacks. In 6 months:

• 140 posts generated (60% from people outside the company)
• 85,000 cumulative impressions
• 12 qualified leads directly traced via the hashtag
• Strengthened positioning as thought leader on B2B growth

The brand hashtag became a marketing asset in its own right, generating organic visibility without advertising budget.

Conclusion: Make LinkedIn Hashtags a Competitive Advantage

LinkedIn company hashtags have evolved, but their strategic importance for B2B companies has never been greater. With over 1.1 billion professionals on the platform and constantly increasing engagement rates, mastering hashtags gives you a tangible competitive advantage.

Key takeaways:

• Company pages now use “Specialisms” (maximum 20) rather than direct hashtags
• Posts with hashtags generate up to 30% more engagement
• The winning formula: 2 broad hashtags + 1 niche hashtag per post
• Analyzing your competitors’ hashtags reveals strategic opportunities
• Derrick automates company hashtag extraction to analyze your market at scale

Whether you’re a Growth Marketer, Social Media Manager, or Sales Ops, integrating a data-driven hashtag strategy into your LinkedIn approach will transform your results. Start by auditing your sector’s 10-20 main competitors, identify the most recurring hashtags, and adjust your own strategy accordingly.

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Your LinkedIn visibility shouldn’t be left to chance. With the right tools and strategy, you can systematically appear in front of your target prospects and transform LinkedIn into a true B2B lead generation engine.

FAQ

Do hashtags still work on LinkedIn in 2026? Yes, hashtags remain effective on LinkedIn in 2026. While company pages now use “Specialisms” rather than direct hashtags, posts with hashtags still generate 30% more engagement. LinkedIn’s algorithm continues using them to categorize and recommend content.

How many hashtags should I use in my LinkedIn posts? LinkedIn officially recommends using between 3 and 5 hashtags per post. The optimal formula: 2 broad hashtags for reach, 1 niche hashtag for relevance, and optionally 1 brand hashtag. More than 5 hashtags makes your post less professional and can be perceived as spam.

What’s the difference between hashtags and Specialisms on LinkedIn? Specialisms replaced company page hashtags in late 2026. They work as keywords without the # symbol and allow adding up to 20 terms to categorize your company. Hashtags remain usable in individual posts with the # symbol.

How can I find hashtags used by my competitors on LinkedIn? You can find them manually by visiting their company page (Specialisms section) and analyzing their recent posts. For large-scale analysis, tools like Derrick automate this extraction and let you retrieve hashtags from dozens of companies directly in Google Sheets.

Should I use English or French hashtags to reach an international B2B audience? It depends on your target market. If you’re mainly targeting French speakers, use French hashtags. For an international audience, favor English as Anglophone hashtags generally have larger communities. You can also mix: 2 English hashtags + 1 French if targeting both audiences.

Are brand hashtags worth it for a small business? Yes, even for small structures. A brand hashtag lets you create a content hub, facilitates campaign tracking, and encourages employee advocacy. Start simply by using it consistently for 3 months before encouraging your community to adopt it.