LinkedIn Live Launches, Alongside New Community Features

LinkedIn had a strong 2019.

It now has 660 million users, with 11 million and 2 million users in Australia and New Zealand respectively.

Usage popped amongst its white-collar user base, as user sessions grew quarter on quarter throughout the year.

Sessions were up 22% in the third quarter of 2019, while revenue grew 25%.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, October 2019

“We saw record levels of engagement again this quarter across the platform. Marketing Solutions remains our fastest growing segment, up 44% year-over-year, as marketers leverage our community-based tools to connect with LinkedIn.”

Following on from this, LinkedIn has unveiled three new marketing updates, set to further bolster platform engagement.

1. LinkedIn Live for company Pages
2. Invite to Follow
3. Post as Page or Member

The three updates centre on LinkedIn Pages and strengthening the dynamics between personal usage and company Pages.

An important distinction, since while LinkedIn has improved significantly for communications purposes within the past two years, Page performance is still weak.

LinkedIn remains much more effective for personal branding than actual branding. Something which the platform will need to address if it is to be taken more seriously by corporate communicators.

LinkedIn Live-Streaming For Pages

LinkedIn Live, which initially rolled out in beta last February, is now available on Pages.

As per every other version of live-streaming, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., LinkedIn Live drives truckloads of interactions, which naturally would translate into very high algorithmic cut-through.

Rishi Jobanputra, LinkedIn Product Manager

“LinkedIn Live has helped members and organisations have real-time interactions with their communities. That’s why brands have seen 7X more reactions and 24X more comments vs standard video posts on LinkedIn.”

Much like elsewhere, LinkedIn Live usage is quiet diverse, with use cases ranging from the predictable corporate stuff to Louis Vitton fashion shows.

LinkedIn has tied in with third-party streaming tools, including Restream, Wirecast and Socialive, and will soon be rolling out a smart new stream targeting feature to help organisations reach the right audiences across different languages and geographies.

It’s also “drawn inspiration from” one of Facebook’s latest live-streaming features, which is a rehearsal mode. Essentially, enabling users to practice their broadcast on LinkedIn before pushing the plunger on going live. Placating anxious CFOs globally no doubt.

Bridging The Personal & Professional Divide

As noted previously, LinkedIn skews to the personal over corporate. Therefore, building up a business’ presence on platfrom can be tough.

LinkedIn’s new Invite to Follow feature aims to make life a bit easier.

Page Admins are now able to invite first-degree Profile connections to follow their LinkedIn Page. Page admins are limited to sending no more than 50 invites per day, and users have the option to opt-out of receiving invites altogether.

If you’d like to get ahead on annoying your connections before everyone else does, you can do so as follows:

1. Sign in to your admin center.
2. Click Admin tools and select Invite connections from the dropdown.
3. Select connections to invite to follow your Page. Connections that’ve been successfully invited or those who are already following your Page will be automatically filtered out.
   • Page admins with less than 500 connections will see a Select all option.
4. Click Invite connections. Your connections will receive an invitation notification.

You’re welcome.

Finally, a minor one for Page admins, LinkedIn is making it easier to share content from your company page via your personal LinkedIn profile with a new toggle option to choose which entity you're posting from. Page Admins can choose whether they would like to post as an individual or as their organisation from the homepage.

Something which might be worth being mindful of next time you are lolling at inappropriate TuttiRecruitti memes on LinkedIn.

Who’d have thought it, memes on LinkedIn.

How good’s business networking…