By John Heffernan, Digital Marketer and LinkedIn Specialist at Red Live Media
Over the last few months, LinkedIn has continued to evolve and, we hope, improve the platform.
For the LinkedIn user, frequent or irregular, the recent updates offer significant opportunities to improve the critical elements of business/sales promotion; Increased authority, trust and visibility.
Remember, people buy from people.
You may have the best product and service, but if you do not promote authority and trust, you may fail to engage the clients you wish to target. And, of course, if you are not visible, those clients will perhaps never even know that you exist.
As with any social media marketing campaign, LinkedIn requires you to have a 100 per cent complete personal profile to set the foundations for visibility and the potential for lead generation.
For this update, we have to assume that you have already created a personal profile with:
- professional headshot image
- background promotion image
- header title
- contact details and
- an About summary of your products and services.
Authors Note: If you are starting out or looking to improve your current LinkedIn profile, the team at IHS will be delighted to help. Contact info@insidehs.com for further information.
Moving on to the more recent features, in no specific order, you should consider:
1 Add a pronoun to your name
You can now add a He/Him, She/Her and, should you choose, a custom designation that will appear after your name on your personal profile header.
2 Promoting Services
You can add titles of the services you provide, which will appear on your personal profile header.
3 Resources
There is a new feature to add up to six resources, including:
- Creator Mode
- My Network – manage connections
- Personal demographic editing
- Salary Insights
- Activity
- My items – including saved articles.
4 Smartphone/Cell phone Functionality
The LinkedIn app delivers several features that are not available via desktop/laptop. Features include the ability to:
- Add a voice recording of your name pronunciation
- Add a 30-second video introduction of who you are and what you do
- View or edit your profile picture and add a frame to your profile image
You can, of course, still create posts and send/interact with invitations to connect.
5 Hashtags and Content
There have been numerous expert analysis reports regarding the impact of adding hashtags to your content. The consensus remains that a maximum of three hashtags is preferred as any more will not be listed in the post URL. Regardless, it is the quality of your content that counts.
6 Newsletter
Adding a newsletter option is an excellent way to engage with your connections and beyond for those with a corporate LinkedIn page.
As previously stated, quality content remains key to the success of a newsletter campaign.
7 Corporate Lead Generation
LinkedIn has included a lead generation form for your corporate pages, allowing connections, followers, and profile viewers to contact you directly within the LinkedIn platform. The forms can be tailored to your specific product and service needs.
8 Corporate or personal comments on posts
You now have the option to select corporate or personal profile links when commenting on news feed posts.
9 Add Skills
While skills have been an integral section of a personal profile for many years, you can now order the skills into:
- Company skill attained/utilised
- Relevance to job role/performance
The first five skills will be displayed on your personal profile header.
10 Industry
LinkedIn has updated their industry categories. As a result, you should check that the category on your current profile remains relevant or edit it to a more appropriate category.
11 Polls
The annoying abuse of the poll post option has resulted in the devaluing of such irrelevant content. The “keep it on Facebook” crowd will be delighted to hear that polls now have less visibility than more quality and relevant content.
12 Clickbait
The trend of posts that request you to like/comment/share to receive XXX in return, such as a download, is now considered clickbait and will result in blocking of profile at worst or no visibility of the poll at best.
13 Reposting
A new feature currently being rolled out is the ability to repost a post.
Although more testing is required, the option to repost to a corporate page appears to be an excellent option and an improvement on the ability to reshare.
14 Audio Events
In addition to the LinkedIn Live option, a new audio-only event is being rolled out, and of course, this adds extra emphasis to those who utilise podcasts.
15 Setting & Privacy Redesign
A new, improved design for your profile settings and privacy section is now available.
16 Sharing your LinkedIn post to external platforms
This is a new feature to encourage wider content distribution with ease. However, we believe that while useful in certain circumstances, content specific to external platforms may prove more beneficial.
Summary
LinkedIn continually updates with new features and functionality. Unfortunately, many users who set and forget will exclude themselves from these new features’ opportunities. If you’d like to learn more about the power of LinkedIn and how you can use it for your businss, contact the team at IHS today and follow them on LinkedIn.
Do you have any industry news that you’d like to share? Send us your press releases, survey results, news, and articles, and we will publish them here on the IHS website. Just complete the contact form and get in touch.