LinkedIn is one of the most important verticals for marketers to leverage, especially in the B2B space where it’s possible to turn connections into clients. As the platform continues to evolve and new features and functionalities are added, it’s crucial for marketers and brands leveraging LinkedIn to understand when and how the platform changes.
On this page, we’ll outline all of the key changes, updates, and usage trends for Linkedin that are relevant to marketers. This page will be continuously updated, making it easy for marketers to make sure their LinkedIn marketing strategy is always up to date.
LinkedIn provides new usage insights
To show why marketing on LinkedIn should be a strategic priority for brands in 2021, the platform released key usage and adoption figures to start the year off. Some notable stats:
The number of live streams on the platform has increased by 89% since March 2020
There are 2.9 million groups on LinkedIn as of Jan. 2021
Over one billion interactions happen on LinkedIn pages every month
Conversions jump 55% when members are connected with each other on LinkedIn
Swipe-up links and CTAs added to LinkedIn Stories
LinkedIn officially launched the ability to append links to posted stories – but only for select users. Members who have at least 5,000 connections and the Follow button as the primary action on their profile (instead of Connect) will gain access to the new feature.
Viewers of a story will have to first swipe up on a “See More” prompt before being shown links attached to a story. For brands/influencers posting stories, an Add Link icon on the top-right will appear when creating a story.
LinkedIn Marketing Labs is launched
Similar to Google’s Skillshop program for Adwords, LinkedIn Marketing Labs is an educational platform designed to help marketers better understand and make more effective use of LinkedIn ads.
By spending time in the lab, the aim is for marketers to learn more about the platform’s ad tools and how to use them in order to better achieve their goals on the platform.
Lead gen forms added to Linkedin product pages
Added in 2020, product pages were a feature added to Linkedin for brands to promote specific products - allowing organizations to provide overviews, answer questions, and showcase reviews for products via one centralized page. Now, brands can also add lead generation forms directly to Linkedin product pages, which are capable of automatically populating forms with information from user profiles with the click of one button.
Users can control viewing and comment permissions on individual posts
Towards the end of January 2021, LinkedIn began rolling out new features allowing users to restrict audiences and comment privileges on a per-post basis. After the rollout, new privacy settings appear when creating a post.
There are now five options available for users to customize post visibility, and three available for customizing comment permissions.
For post visibility, the following options appear under the prompt Who can see your post?:
For comment permissions, the following three options appear under the prompt Who can comment on your post?:
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
