What do B2B marketers need to know about LinkedIn’s* new full-length articles, profile ratings and reviews, Live Events, Learning Hub skill-building platform, and updated accessibility features?
The world’s largest professional social media platform — with more than 774 million users — has rolled out an impressive assortment of new features throughout 2021, including five recent additions that bring a goldmine of new opportunities for B2B marketers.
For the first time, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn saw annual revenue topping the $10 billion mark, Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft announced in July, with quarterly revenue up 46 percent.
This growth has been accompanied by a number of powerful and fascinating new feature roll-outs that are poised to make a change in how B2B marketers utilize LinkedIn.
Let’s jump right in and look at five of the key new LinkedIn features and how they’ll affect B2B marketers.
1 — Publish Long-Form Content Using Page Articles
LinkedIn has launched a new feature that gives company pages the ability to share long-form content on the professional social platform.
Unlike personal LinkedIn accounts, until this addition business pages had faced a limit in the length of the material that could be organically posted.
In addition to allowing articles of virtually any length, LinkedIn’s new Articles For Pages feature offers a variety of analytics information about the people and businesses reading and interacting with that long-form content — helpful for businesses to learn more about their target audience.
LinkedIn has made the process of publishing detailed articles intuitive, with an interface that’s familiar to anyone who has posted a traditional update on its platform, conveniently available to page administrators as “Write article” as an always-visible option beneath the “Start a post” prompt, as shown in yellow below.
Editing options for articles include the ability to highlight quotes, incorporate links, and include calls-to-action such as linking to a company website, encouraging readers to become followers of the page, or even downloading a related digital asset.
Firms using the new feature will face the issue of determining just how much to publish on LinkedIn versus on their own websites. Through experimentation, company’s can look for a mixture that produces the best engagement and maximum impact for the unique needs of each business.
With more B2B brands making significant use of discussion in the form of comments on LinkedIn, the new long-form article feature provides fascinating options for firms to consider when it comes to where they want to engage clients and prospects.
Learn more about this new feature at Articles for Pages: Build Community with Long-Form Content.
2 — Share Customer Praise With Ratings & Reviews
LinkedIn also recently began offering review and rating features to user profiles, as part of a new more robust services profile element that can now include a range of past client reviews and ratings.
When LinkedIn initially rolled out the ability for individual users and small businesses to create a no-cost service page, the feature was primarily a static list of services — now however, the updated services page optionally allows reviews from past clients to add real-world feedback.
Creating a service page on LinkedIn helps users and small businesses make the services they provide more discoverable both on the platform and through third-party search engines, and allows all LinkedIn users to make contact inquiring about the services listed.
Learn more about how to create a LinkedIn Service Page, explore frequently asked questions, find out how to invite clients to review a service page, and check out our own “5 Stars: 20+ Tips to Invigorate Your B2B Marketing Using Testimonials & Reviews.”
3 — Enhanced LinkedIn Live Experience
Another area that has recently been enhanced by LinkedIn is an updated LinkedIn Live Events experience, allowing users to create more robust virtual events.
LinkedIn Live is the platform’s live video feature, and recent updates have combined many of its abilities with those of LinkedIn’s separate event experiences. The integrated offering now automatically creates a public event post for each scheduled live-streaming event, which then appears in the LinkedIn feed.
Users who have chosen to attend a LinkedIn Live event will also now receive helpful reminder messages, and LinkedIn will additionally notify certain followers of the company page hosting the event.
Another change has made it possible to have more lead time than the previous seven day limit when scheduling LinkedIn Live events.
Learn more about the updated integration between LivedIn Live and events, and check out our own “Livestream Marketing: 5 B2B Brands Rocking LinkedIn Live.”
4 — Utilize LinkedIn Learning Hub Skill-Building Platform
LinkedIn has just launched its LinkedIn Learning Hub, a robust skill-building platform looking to expand on what is available from traditional learning experience platforms (LXPs).
As Amy Borsetti, senior director at LinkedIn Talent Solutions announced yesterday in “With LinkedIn Learning Hub, a New Era of Skill Building Starts Today,” the new LinkedIn Learning Hub is part of a movement that’s fundamentally changing the way people learn.
Savvy B2B marketers know that the ever-changing industry requires ongoing education, and with its new LinkedIn Learning Hub, a wealth of learning and development (L&D) offerings are on tap for marketers seeking to make learning a lifelong pursuit.
5 — Lighten The Load On Your Eyes With Dark Mode
Increased accessibility, inclusivity, and reduced eye-strain-inducing blue light are among the aims for LinkedIn’s new dark mode option, being rolled out to the professional platform’s users.
LinkedIn has taken a measured approach to carefully implementing its dark mode, which is a part of its move to make the platform more inclusive and accessible through the use of upgrades making the visual elements of LinkedIn as clear and eye-strain-free as possible, including support for the free Be My Eyes app for blind and low-vision users.
Learn more about LinkedIn’s new dark mode and other accessibility updates.
B2B Brands Work Smarter With LinkedIn’s New Features
With its latest updates including full-length articles for pages, profile ratings and reviews, LinkedIn Live Events, a new LinkedIn Learning Hub skill-building platform, and new features for accessibility in the form of a dark mode, LinkedIn has made it easier than ever for B2B marketers to create meaningful engagement on the world’s biggest professional business network.
Crafting award-winning B2B marketing with a skillful mixture of influence takes considerable time and effort, which is why many firms choose to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Talk with us about how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.
* LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.
