LinkedIn is at the forefront of social media marketing for most B2Bs, as well as B2Cs looking to discover new recruits and customer insights. With the platform rapidly evolving both design-wise and in terms of features, how can businesses take advantage this year and beyond?

If you’re not aware already, LinkedIn’s recent site redesign also came with a host of new features for its Premium Business users. Now, these users have been given access to multiple tools, including the likes of Business Insights data on company pages, unlimited people browsing, and the ability to receive a greater amount of InMail each month. And one of the most instrumental new products available is LinkedIn Learning, which Premium Business users can now access for free. This enables companies to make use of Lynda, the platform’s roster of around 10,000 videos, for educational and training purposes.

But aside from making use of these updates, how can businesses refine their strategy further? Read on for three of our most useful methods.

Advanced searches

Although not a new feature, advanced search enables the user to search by sector, content type, location, and type of business. Using this is crucial for organisations wishing to search for target audiences, key stakeholders, related groups, and for recruiters looking for new talent. LinkedIn provides related search terms too based on the user’s key word input. What’s also useful is the platform’s algorithm, which uses AI to learn more about the user’s search preferences over time. Users are also able to save their searches too, allowing for quicker discovery in future.

Expert content

While it’s essential for businesses to share their own written content to LinkedIn- from blog posts to site information and resources such as white papers and reports, external content must be included in the mix too. In fact, many content marketers rely on the 4-1-1 rule of distribution, ensuring that for every owned piece they share, they also share content from other expert voices. For a financial services firm for instance, this might be two expert pieces from an editorial, a company CEO’s blog post shared to LinkedIn, and a recent data report. This not only shows thought leadership and awareness of the current global and online buzz, but also shows that you have your audience’s wants in mind. It’s also important for businesses to post their own content to their page regularly, and the higher amount of traction it receives, the more likely it is to be featured on LinkedIn Pulse, the site’s publishing platform. And businesses can publish directly to Pulse too, helping boost exposure and engagement.

Showcase pages

Company pages can benefit enormously from having one or more showcase pages- those that house specific content for specific audiences. For instance, a company can create these to separate the various products it sells- Adobe for example, has different pages for its range of software products. This also helps it to target the wide variety of groups who use each product most. Showcase pages can attract followers in their own right, and with all linking back to the company’s main LinkedIn page, they are also a great traffic driver. And just like company pages, showcase pages can be updated in the same way. The overarching benefit for larger companies in particular is to keep content well organised, rather than overloading their main page with every single piece.

Does your business utilise LinkedIn’s unique features for social media marketing? Have you benefitted from the channel for discovery and promotion? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.