Expanded LinkedIn Features and Functions Rolling Out

LinkedIn’s marketing renaissance continues apace, as the platform rolls out a raft of its new LinkedIn Page updates, announced just before Xmas.

LinkedIn’s latest attempt to woo businesses, and in particular, marketers, is a relaunch of LinkedIn Company Pages, subsequently now known as LinkedIn Pages.

The refresh and rebuild is geared to ‘foster active communities and conversations on LinkedIn with a company’s employees, customers and followers’, according to LinkedIn.

With over 30 million Pages on the platform, the rebuild is likely to have quite an impact for LinkedIn site engagement. Building on decent, if not overdue, product launches in 2018 the new changes offer good organic opportunities for content marketing, discoverability and employee advocacy.  

Better Content Marketing, Richer Brand Engagement

Content marketing is something which many organisations find difficult.

Even for those that have a good thematic structure, context can be a struggle. Similarly, generating a fresh angle or idea on a topic you discuss frequently, isn't easy.

LinkedIn Page admins should now note a new Content Suggestions tab within the admin interface.

The new feature surfaces the topics and content trending with a business’s target audience on LinkedIn. It shows not only the topics and posts trending, but interestingly the relative Engagement Rate for that post. The Engagement Rate is dictated by the audience filters applied, which is a nice addition.

Usually, most engagement data is generic and non-audience specific, so this handy for content producers. For example, check out the relative Engagement Rates, from the samples below, for this AdNews piece on the recent Gillette Ad saga:

• Sample One
  1. Audience Size: 50,000+
  2. Filter By: All LinkedIn Users
  3. Industry: Marketing & Advertising
  4. Topic: Marketing & Advertising
  5. Location: AU/NZ
  6. Engagement Rate: 38%
• Sample Two
  1. Audience Size: 10,000
  2. Filter By: All LinkedIn Users
  3. Industry: Marketing & Advertising
  4. Topic: Marketing & Advertising
  5. Location: AU/NZ
  6. Job Function: Marketing  
  7. Engagement Rate: 20%

For a more intimate view of what’s trending, larger organisations with many staff, or followers on LinkedIn, can apply filters to these more niche groups. Content can then be created or curated to suit.

LinkedIn Discoverability and Day-To-Day Implementation

Alongside Content Suggestions, admins will also note a few other NEW markers dotted around the user interface. Most prompts  to add a bit of extra copy here and there, i.e. Taglines and Hashtags.

While some of these updates are quite subtle, they’re still worth applying, when you get a minute, since a more complete profile aids indexation and discoverability. Both within LinkedIn and Google usually.

On top of this, it can impact how your Page renders when viewed on mobile.

Speaking of mobile, the rebuild of LinkedIn Pages also coincides with some improvements rolling out on the LinkedIn app, related to posting and responding to comments. While the LinkedIn app is decent for users, it hasn’t been that helpful for community managers previously.

However, to be fair, even with these updates, it has work to do on this front. Although LinkedIn has community integrations with third parties, like Hootsuite, not having a native mobile business solution is a bit 2013.