LinkedIn has launched a new tool to make the lives of those who manage a lot of ads, Pages or people easier.

As the temporary arrangements of those lost pandemic years become more permanent, it’s becoming more important to manage your affairs online. Business Manager seeks to do just that.

Gyanda Sachdeva, Vice President, Product Management

“LinkedIn Business Manager is a centralized platform that will make it easier for those of you who work at large enterprises and agencies to manage the people, ad accounts, Pages, and businesses you work with.”

What is LinkedIn’s new Business Manager tool?

LinkedIn says it will enhance your Campaign Manager and Pages experience by providing a central location to control both. It also claims that marketers can help brands uncover strategic insights that ‘make marketing at scale more efficient’. It will also provide several other benefits:

• View and manage your team, business partners and ad accounts from a centralised dashboard.
• Free up time on boring admin such as billing or user permissions so you can focus on campaigns instead. Marketers can access user access your accounts and Pages and download monthly invoices.
• Quickly reach buyers by sharing Matches Audiences across accounts, which will help save time on executing campaigns.

A valuable tool

Business Manager has been built with B2B customers in mind.

Gyanda Sachdeva, Vice President, Product Management

“Whether it’s increasing visibility into how your brand shows up on LinkedIn or helping you reach potential buyers more quickly, we’re always considering new ways to  help you work smarter and drive more value for your companies and clients.”

Business Manager has been tested on businesses such as Xero, Merkle B2B and GroupM Canada and is being rolled out across the globe in the next few weeks.

Improved content performance

LinkedIn has also made it easier for brands and marketers to increase engagement and “spark conversations” through new features for Articles and Newsletters.

Ting Ba, Director of Product Marketing, LinkedIn

“We’re introducing the ability to include both @mentions and #hashtags in Articles and Newsletters to help you further grow and engage your communities.”

In the next few weeks, brands will be able to mention members and pages within an Article or Newsletter. The move will assist collaborators to help distribute content, which should increase reach and engagement and make it more of a profitable move to publish written text on LinkedIn.

Humanise your brand

Brands have been given the ability to respond as a brand to any post in feed, regardless of whether they’ve been mentioned or tagged in the post.

We’ve seen a lot of marketers do this over on Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – and there will be users who don’t like marketers’ attempts to humanise the corporations they work for.

Ting Ba, Director of Product Marketing, LinkedIn

“By joining these conversations, brands can share their unique perspective, reach new audiences, and grow their followers.”

However, LinkedIn does have a point. Brands who join in conversations and do it well can gain followers, reach new audiences and boost engagement.

Here are a few examples of brands that engage well, provided by LinkedIn.

• Vimeo uses Newsletters to generate engagement by providing insight and responding to comments.
• Reddit comments on posts and replies to mentions to show off a more playful side, and humanise themselves.
• Loom shares content that demonstrated how their product can best be used.

As you can see, both updates are designed to help LinkedIn marketers make the most of the platform. Business Manager pulls together the threads of LinkedIn to make life easier for those who manage accounts and perform tasks more efficiently, which leaves more room for creative marketing, while Newsletter and Page updates create greater opportunity for brands to grow an engaged, organic audience who values what they have to say.

LinkedIn may not be a social media that some marketers consider, but it’s certainly making moves to make it a more popular destination for all brands.