With over 500 million global users, LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world so having a page on the platform for your business is essential.
In mid-November 2018, LinkedIn relaunched Company Pages as LinkedIn Pages with a host of new features to help businesses have brand relevance with their audiences and increase their reach.
The new features are designed to help businesses leverage LinkedIn to grow and see what customers value the most. Here’s what you need to know about the new LinkedIn Pages.
Native-content sharing
LinkedIn Pages now gives businesses the ability to share different media types inside the platform. You can enhance your posts to include PDFs and other documents, and even share videos. Video use is fast expanding on LinkedIn, up 17 per cent with marketers from 2017.
LinkedIn is playing a bit of catch-up with video, so the new features are designed to prioritise their native video platform over externally linked videos. For example, native LinkedIn videos will auto-play in the newsfeed and will be visible longer than those shared from other platforms such as YouTube. It’s similar to Facebook’s video platform and that’s probably a smart move as trying to be radically different this late in the game would be risky – a familiar UX was the right call. It’s straight out of the Netflix playbook.
Audience recon
The better you know your audience, the better your content will be, the more success you can achieve. Content that resonates with an audience is built by design. And to help you along with that LinkedIn has created a sweet little feature called Content Suggestions which tells you what your audience is interested in.
This information allows you to tailor your content to the preferences of your audience. It’s like knowing everyone’s dietary requirements before a dinner party so not a single dish is met with “I’m sorry, I’m allergic to flavour so I can’t eat that. Do you have any gluten-free essence of sadness?”
This additional feature helps you stay on message and drive high quality traffic to your page. The visual analytics that come with LinkedIn Pages will also help you understand how successful your content strategy is and how you are performing over any given period. And every month they will send you a tidy summary email with your audience demographics and the content they’re interacting with most. NICE!
Use the workforce
Businesses are notoriously bad at leveraging their existing employee network to grow their brand. It’s almost criminal how such an awesome and effectively free resource is taken for granted. If utilised effectively, employees, collaborators, clients and partners can help you extend your reach so far, you’ll start calling yourself Mr. Tickle.
Every time someone tags your business into a post your page admin will get a notification and those posts can be shared to your page for quick, easy and free content. This gives your content creators more time to make targeted posts without your page looking dull and empty, making your brand more relatable.
Mobile admin – finally, no more FOMO!
One massive drawback for LinkedIn compared with Facebook Business Pages, for example, was the clunky mobile app and lack of admin ability on mobile devices causing a severe case of Fear of Missing Out.
Trying to stay relevant is tough when you have to be at your desk to be part of the conversation. With mobile admin you can now respond to comments wherever you are and post content to your page on the go as though at your desk.
Over half of LinkedIn’s traffic comes from their mobile app but it has taken until now to add LinkedIn Page admin functionality – still, better late than never. And with up to three hashtags to associate with your LinkedIn Page your brand will never miss a conversation on trending topics. Bye bye FOMO!
Owning a business but not using a LinkedIn Page for it is a bit like going on holiday to Europe but never leaving the airport hotel. Sure, you’re in Europe but you’re not really making the most of it.
So, go on, make the most of LinkedIn Pages’ new features and expand your brand’s reach.
