How Recent LinkedIn Updates Can Be Leveraged to Engage Your Audience

LinkedIn has prioritized on-platform engagement over the last few months, developing a handful of new features that encourage dialogue and help facilitate interaction between members. With record levels of engagement – up 24% year over year – it seems those efforts are paying off. To better understand these new offerings and their implications for brands, we’re diving in to how recent LinkedIn updates can be leveraged to engage your audience.

LinkedIn Live

Earlier this year, LinkedIn finally caught up with the other major social networks and debuted its own version of live video streaming, LinkedIn Live. As with other forms of live video, LinkedIn Live allows broadcasters to share videos with their network in real time.

For brands, LinkedIn Live offers an opportunity to engage members in a variety of ways such as live streaming from conferences, Q&A sessions with key brand figures, sharing real-time product announcements, and so much more. Since launching its native video tools in 2017, video has grown to become the most engaging content type on LinkedIn, so we expect to see live video succeed at engaging members as well.

LinkedIn is currently piloting live video streaming with select broadcasters, so the feature isn’t yet available to all members. Brands and users can request to become a live video broadcaster here.

Post Reactions

We’re all familiar Facebook’s various post reactions like ‘Love’ and ‘Haha’, but did you know that LinkedIn now has its own set of reaction buttons on posts? We first discussed the possibility of this update and other LinkedIn engagement trends in this post, and now we’re seeing the update come to life.

LinkedIn stated that it regularly received feedback that users wanted more expressive ways than a “Like” to respond to the different posts in their feed. It was from this feedback and other research that they developed four new reactions to posts, in addition to ‘Like.’ The new reactions include ‘Celebrate’, ‘Love’, ‘Insightful’, and ‘Curious.’ In deciding which reactions to add to the repertoire, LinkedIn analyzed the top 1-2 word comments on posts and the type of content that people share most.

With a wider range of available reactions, LinkedIn members may be more prone to interact on posts. Brands can leverage this feature by including calls to action for members to share their sentiment around an update by tapping the reaction most relevant to them.

Document and Presentation Upload

In hopes to spark deeper conversation around post updates, LinkedIn is giving users the power to attach a much wider variety of file types to their posts. Now, all member have the ability to upload documents and presentations such as PDFs and PowerPoints directly to their feed, in a group, or to a LinkedIn Page.

Now, one thing we’d like to caution here is that just because you can upload an entire presentation deck to a post, doesn’t mean you should. Keep in mind that social audiences’ attention is constantly being pulled in different directions, and they may not want to spend fifteen minutes sifting through one presentation.

This is, however, a great opportunity for Company Pages to pull out key pieces of information from a best practices playbook or a recent trends report, or even share a full whitepaper or case study depending on its length. These are all opportunities to not only spark discussion around your brand, but also showcase your company’s thought leadership on LinkedIn.

As a social-first agency, we’re constantly analyzing the latest social media trends like these. If you’re looking for insight on how these and other updates may impact your brand, let’s talk



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