Using hashtags helps you increase your LinkedIn reach and get your updates in front of people outside your immediate LinkedIn network without needing to be connected, get comments, or get likes on your status updates. This raises brand awareness on LinkedIn for your company and your personal brand.

When you visit LinkedIn and type any hashtag into the search bar, you will get a list of relevant people, companies, groups, and posts. Technically, you could also search for jobs with that hashtag, but I haven’t seen many job descriptions using hashtags (yet!).

#SocialSelling is one of the hashtags I use frequently because it’s what I want to be known for. After adding that hashtag to my LinkedIn summary, I now appear in the top ten for social selling on LinkedIn. I also have the term “social selling” woven throughout my headline and profile, so that also improves my LinkedIn search results.

I have one simple tip for making hashtag usage more elegant: Use hashtags in sentences. Don’t just append them to the end of a tweet or other social media update.

A memorable and well-timed hashtag can be the difference between a well-received campaign and one that peters out without much notice. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that a growing number of brands are turning to trademark law to stop others building off their past success.

There has been a 64% global growth in the trademarking of hashtags since 2016, according to trademark research company CompuMark. The first application to trademark a hashtag was made in 2010. Since then there have been over 5,000 applications of which 2,200 were in 2016.