How LinkedIn became community-driven. Even in 2019, LinkedIn is often characterized as Facebook’s ‘uptight’ brother who only talks about work. That’s no longer true, though: the platform has shifted gears towards building communities and participating in the exchange of ideas. While B2B businesses typically struggle with platforms like Instagram and Twitter, LinkedIn is the place
How LinkedIn became community-driven.
Even in 2019, LinkedIn is often characterized as Facebook’s ‘uptight’ brother who only talks about work. That’s no longer true, though: the platform has shifted gears towards building communities and participating in the exchange of ideas.
While B2B businesses typically struggle with platforms like Instagram and Twitter, LinkedIn is the place where they prosper. So it’s no surprise that 2019’s new LinkedIn features are designed to help B2B businesses thrive with effective marketing.
Keep on reading to discover the latest ways to “amp up” your LinkedIn presence in 2019.
What You’ll Learn in This Article
Your Rebuilt Company Page
If you haven’t touched your company LinkedIn page in ages, this is the year to do so. LinkedIn added new sections to company pages to help generate leads and turn connections to relationships. New sections include hashtags, content suggestions, and sharing documents. Facebook users will recognize a few of these additions below.
Hashtags
Previously, LinkedIn’s hashtags weren’t as useful as those on other social platforms like Twitter and Instagram. However, the hashtags are now here to stay to make posts more searchable and connect communities.
Keep in mind that LinkedIn is still a professional platform; be cautious of using certain hashtags that won’t fly well within your industry or other professionals. Also, it’s recommended that you limit your posts to a maximum of five hashtags—or else the LinkedIn algorithm will flag it as spam.
Now, here’s the big question: how do you know what hashtags to use?
First, try checking here to discover hashtags based on your activity and industry, including the company pages you manage. LinkedIn can make great recommendations for you as a starting point. You’ll want to focus on hashtags for niche communities within your industry, but keep it balanced by utilizing general hashtags, too.
You’ll want to focus on hashtags for niche communities within your industry but keep it balanced by utilizing general hashtags too.
Location-based hashtags are great to target users in a specific region since 70% of LinkedIn’s users live outside the U.S.
After researching your list of hashtags, choose the top three to display on your company page i.e., the hashtags with the largest following and most relevant to your industry. These three hashtags will help your company engage with conversations and connect with other thought-leaders.
Content Suggestions
LinkedIn now makes curation so much easier. As a company manager or page admin, you’ll notice ‘Content Suggestions’ on the top bar with your other Admin tools. You can see trending topics within your industry and page followers, and share to your company page.
If you’re looking for specific content, LinkedIn allows you to filter content suggestions from LinkedIn members, page followers or employees. Or, use filters to see content from a specific industry, location, job function or seniority. Take the time to play around with the feature to gain inspiration for your own unique content that your audience is most likely to engage with!
Sharing Documents
Hooray for document support! Unlike Facebook and most platforms, you can now share PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and PDFs with your followers and groups. To use this feature, visit your home page feed and you will notice a new, third icon enabling you to share documents. Why is this a neat feature? Because you can use these formats to share content such as informational guides or downloadable templates.
You can also utilize it for storytelling and social media campaigns. Remember, LinkedIn users typically engage more with helpful information related to their job profession, so documents are perfect to meet those needs.
The Big Picture
2019’s new LinkedIn features may seem simple at first glance. However, in a wider scope, you can see that LinkedIn is pushing for a platform that is community driven versus individualistic. Hashtags, content suggestions and sharing documents all propel the goal of passing around industry knowledge with like-minded, career-oriented individuals.
As a B2B business, you’ll benefit from participating in the conversation and better yet, by using these new LinkedIn features, make your LinkedIn campaigns effective and attractive.
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