LinkedIn is to roll out a series of new features that will provide page owners with increased abilities to understand their audience, communicate with their teams and promote online events.
Among the new features is the ability for company page owners to see a full list of their page’s followers as well as the ability to sort followers by company, industry and location.
As well as this, page owners will be able to see ‘insights’ into their followers such as how they found your page. This is a significant development for the platform which had previously only enabled page owners to see the aggregate number of their followers and basic, generalised information.
‘My Company’ tab
The platform has also announced the launch of the ‘my company’ tab, a new feature within LinkedIn pages that will gather employee information including key milestones and ‘trending content’ that has been shared by your team.
LinkedIn has said that it plans to extend the functionality of this new feature by adding tools, “like the ability to curate unique content, broadcast that content to your employees so it can be shared organically, and measure the impact of their reach”.
Dedicated ‘events’ tab
Another addition to the left-hand panel of a page will be an ‘events’ tab. LinkedIn says the tab will automatically provide visitors with a view of your past, present and upcoming events.
Analysis – evolution, not revolution
To be honest, I was surprised that LinkedIn page owners couldn’t already see who their followers were. The current emphasis online is to protect privacy, so to see the platform retrospectively provide more information on page followers goes somewhat against the current flow.
That said, this certainly isn’t an invasive level of information and frankly, being able to see one’s followers should enable page owners to provide a more tailored experience to their followers. Let’s face it, LinkedIn is a business tool, so the concept of using its data to target your audience is nothing new.
Apart from this, the announcement seems to be a fairly run-of-the-mill update – despite this, improvements in how companies can promote events and interact with colleagues will be welcome.
