LinkedIn is now offering more tools to help businesses gain visibility and reach more people.
LinkedIn said “To help your content stand out and make it easier for others to discover, we’ve developed several new tools. We’re excited to see how you use them to engage with your audiences on LinkedIn. .…we hope that, as a result, your network will quickly find and engage with your content, leading to more professional connections and opportunities.”
But what are these tools and how much difference can they really make to you?
What’s new on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn has clearly been putting some work into the platform lately, because they’ve introduced improvements in four different areas:
1) SEO Tools
You can now optimize your articles on LinkedIn for SEO. You can customize how your articles appear on search engines and change the title and meta description. What this means is that, instead of simply displaying the first few lines of your article in the search engines, you can create your own description that includes relevant keywords, and this is what LinkedIn will display on search engines.
All you need to do is go to any articles you’ve already created and click the Publishing Menu in the top left-hand corner. You will then see a pop-up box where you can customize your title and meta description. Click Save at the bottom right and you’re done.
If you already have a lot of articles published on LinkedIn, it will take some time to update them, but this will make a significant difference to your visibility on search engines and on LinkedIn itself, so it is well worth taking the time to do the updates.
2) Activity Section
We’d say that out of all of the updates, this is the biggest. LinkedIn hasn’t changed the appearance of user profiles in a major way for a long time, but, finally they have and it looks like the update has been worth the wait.
In your Activity section on your profile, you can now choose the content types that appear at the top. This allows you to choose the best of your portfolio or services and show them off as the first thing that visitors see in your Activity section. Draw attention to what you want to promote or show your best work to help persuade people to hire your business.
This makes your profile highly visual and attractive and you can choose from videos, documents, images, and newsletters to highlight what you want people to see.
Curate your content on your profile and make it good with high quality images and video and nothing less than the best you can offer to draw people’s attention and keep it.
3) Newsletters
It’s been possible to schedule posts on LinkedIn for a while, but now you can also schedule your newsletter on the platform too. Just go to the Share box and click Schedule to set the date and time for your newsletter to go out.
This is a big time saver and if you check your analytics, you can be sure that you’re sending your newsletter at the best time to reach your audience.
To help you build your newsletter subscribers, LinkedIn has also added an embeddable button and a one-click subscribe URL. LinkedIn users can click that link or the button and quickly subscribe to your newsletter directly from the platform.
Finally, to aid visibility, LinkedIn users will now be able to see your newsletter under your name on your profile.
4) Analytics
LinkedIn is also introducing a new central area for both creating and measuring content. You’ll be able to create your content and measure its impact in the same place.
You will need to have a Creator profile before you can see this. When you do, go to your profile, and click on Analytics & Tools at the very top. This works for both mobile and desktop for flexibility when you’re away from the office.
So often websites decide to do “new and improved” things and get it horribly wrong. They claim to have added dramatic improvements or wonderful new features, only to make things clunkier and more difficult to use.
However, that isn’t the case here. LinkedIn really has thought these improvements through and they do genuinely add to what businesses can now do on the platform and, more importantly, how businesses can be found on the platform and on search engines.
You should discover that you can save time and effort with the new tools, along with gaining visibility, increasing your connections, and building your newsletter subscribers.
Work these new tools and options well and you could find yourselves ahead of the competition.
What’s not to like?
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