3 New LinkedIn Features for B2B Marketers in 2017

LinkedIn should be part of every B2B company’s marketing strategy. The most popular business-focused social media website on the internet, LinkedIn is perfect for B2B marketers looking to build brand awareness and credibility.

Since the start of 2017, LinkedIn has made many improvements to its platform; here are three to keep in mind as you build your LinkedIn marketing strategy:

LinkedIn analytics

In January, LinkedIn announced a major redesign of its desktop interface. The feature B2B marketers will want to pay attention to is LinkedIn’s enhanced analytics. According to the website, “You can now see who’s reading and engaging with the content you share, including the company, job title and location of the people who are interested in your updates.” Use these insights to learn about what type of content your audience is most interested in; this will let you create new content that is likely to resonate with your audience.

LinkedIn “Trending Storylines”

In March, LinkedIn announced their Trending Storylines feature, which LinkedIn describes as “daily curated interest-based feeds about the most important developing stories in your industry.” LinkedIn uses algorithms and its editorial team to serve up content from news feeds that is personalized for each user.

Here’s how to increase the chance that your content will appear in a LinkedIn Trending Storyline:

• Create industry-specific content that people tend to be interested in, and relate it to a popular ongoing news story, if possible.
• Make it fresh. LinkedIn says if content is “new, novel, and delivers up-to-date insights for our members,” it will receive preferential treatment.
• Keep it professional. Content associated with your company and brand should always be professional, so it shouldn’t be difficult to meet this parameter.
• Grow your network. LinkedIn will be more likely to display content from people within a person’s network than people outside of it. Working to grow your network is, therefore, a sound strategy.

LinkedIn comment management

LinkedIn’s comments feature is a great way to encourage two-way conversations with readers and can lead to your content reaching a larger audience. Nevertheless, there may be times when you need to control when comments are open and when they are not. In April, LinkedIn announced that content publishers can now turn off comments on long-form articles before or after they’ve posted an article. You can also report inappropriate comments posted to articles for which comments are open. According to the website, “While this is currently available for long-form articles only, we’ll soon add the option to turn off comments on all of your LinkedIn posts.”

Here at 3 Aspens, we keep abreast of social media feature updates to better serve our clients, and we’ll continue to share insights like these with our e-newsletter subscribers. Subscribe here to receive our latest blogs in your inbox.