LinkedIn updates to strengthen your online marketing

LinkedIn has always been considered to be the business social media platform, a place for professionals, whether they’re looking for a position within a company or to expand their business connections. With some of the recently added features and their re-designed company pages, there’s no better time to include LinkedIn in your marketing strategy, especially if you are a B2B company. So let’s look at the latest LinkedIn updates.

I wasn’t surprised to read that LinkedIn’s cofounder Reid Hoffman was part of the “PayPal Mafia” which I first came across in Elon Musk’s biography by Ashlee Vance; the dot com legacy is still all pervasive it seems and entrepreneurs continue to benefit from their predecessors. It’s no wonder that brilliant business influencers such as Brené Brown and Seth Godin choose LinkedIn to connect, share and engage with their audiences! We use it to strengthen our online presence by having a company page where we share updates and marketing knowledge and by having our profiles optimised to reflect what we do as directors of Shake It Up Creative. Being active on LinkedIn via your personal profiles and your company page has many benefits which can help to strengthen your online marketing.

We’d like to highlight some of the newest features of LinkedIn company pages, groups and LinkedIn mobile app – the latest LinkedIn updates.

Company page hashtags
You can associate your page with up to three hashtags which helps with social listening and can keep you in the loop about your brand or relevant topics. This means that you can ensure you are part of any conversations that are relevant or important for your business. This feature is on the right side of your company page on desktop.

Slidedecks
You can share your visually rich brand stories by posting slidedecks and PDFs. Use the document icon to upload your content and add a description which will appear when your connections or followers mouse over or out of your document. The number of slides/pages are automatically shown, making it user friendly and visually different to a regular post. You can also view full screen whilst staying within the LinkedIn platform. I’m actually quite excited about this as we can add an even stronger design element to our posts! It’s almost like bringing Slideshare within the actual LinkedIn platform. And don’t forget to add your comment and any #hashtags as well.

Group notifications
One aspect of LinkedIn which is benefitting business owners is the attention being paid to groups. Users now see notifications for new group posts in feeds and in the notifications icon which is great for making group postings and conversations more visible and helping you keep up to date with what’s happening within your groups. This LinkedIn update is definitely generating more activity and helping to prevent groups from going stale. It’s a great incentive for users to post within groups, especially if part of your strategy is to increase your industry specific credibility or network online.

Video
Although Linkedin is late to the table when it comes to video, in addition to posting native video (on both your personal profile and company page), you can now post live videos on the mobile app. LinkedIn Live is only currently available to a select group for desktop users with the plan to become more widely available over time. Video is the fastest growing format on the platform so perhaps it’s one for you to explore. One of our friends, Stephanie Ward shares valuable information with her online network through video. Check out her activity and learn from her. Let us know if you use this feature and how it’s going for you. A mobile specific feature includes being able to add stickers to images and videos! Go on, you know you want to give this a try.

Scan connections
The LinkedIn QR code feature enables you to connect in person online. If you’re like us, LinkedIn is usually our first port of call when we want to follow up with someone we met at an in-person event, or simply connect with. Now you don’t have to wait until after the event, you can connect during the event by scanning their QR code. Have you tried this mobile app feature yet? Look for the QR icon on the right side of the search box in your profile . Tap ‘Scan’ to connect with someone and if they ask to scan yours, tap ‘My code’. I learned about this at a networking event with speaker Linda Huckle who was sharing some of the newest additions to the LinkedIn app. We were all able to test it out right there and then.

We hope highlighting some of the LinkedIn updates that have been rolling out recently has helped get you interested in using LinkedIn as an online visibility tool or sparked your interest enough to revisit, optimise your profile, join and participate in groups and share rich content. If you know of any recent LinkedIn updates that might be helpful to our audience, please do share them in the comments below.

Meg Fenn, Director of Shake It Up Creative