LinkedIn’s Rocking – What’s New on LinkedIn?

What's New on LinkedIn?

These LinkedIn features are New somewhere in the world!

Depending who you are and where in the world you are some or all of these features are now live.

What's New on LinkedIn
Native Video

Let’s start with LinkedIn’s newest big change introducing Native Video to their platform. This actually started rolling out in July this year when LinkedIn Beta tested it with various influencers.

LinkedIn's Native video can only be accessed on mobile so you will need to download the LinkedIn app and make sure you have the latest version.

What are Native videos?

Native videos are videos that are created within or uploaded directly on to the platform, they then auto-play within the News Feed of that platform. LinkedIn’s autoplay, thank goodness, is without the sound so you need to click to hear the video.

Ordinary Video is a video that is live or recorded that when made has been uploaded to a 3rd party like YouTube, Vimeo or Wista and then the URL link from the video is used on the social media platform like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This functionality is still available on LinkedIn.

Both Facebook and Twitter have had Native Video for several years and now at last LinkedIn has to. Why is this so exciting, why is it so important? Well, that’s a whole other blog, but just think of how important video is on all media platforms today and then all the possibilities of what is coming next!

The next step will be, should be, Live video streaming on LinkedIn – that’s right isn’t it Jeff Weiner?

Here are some of the basics for getting started with LinkedIn Native Video

1. Open the LinkedIn app on your mobile
2. When you click in the area “share an article, photo or idea” the new video icon will come up
3. On the next screen, choose a pre-recorded video from your camera roll or click Video to record a video on the spot your video will automatically be saved to your camera roll first so you can make alterations before uploading to your news feed.
4. The video must be more than 3 seconds and less than 10 minutes.
5. A maximum of 700 characters of text can be added to your update to describe your video, call out connections, tag people or use #hashtags. But on mobile, only the first 240 characters show before it gets truncated.
6. When you finish hit Post
7. You can add these Native videos to your profile, by copying the link to the Media section within your profile.

As these are not live videos you can alter any bloopers and make sure that you have high-quality professional content in line with LinkedIn’s business platform. I am not saying have it to perfect or stuffy, as this is a great way of getting your personality across to your connections.

What's New on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Conversion Tracking

LinkedIn conversion tracking was Rolled out last year but I wonder how many people are using this on their web sites?

Conversion tracking was one of the most anticipated LinkedIn releases, on the platform. With LinkedIn conversion tracking you are able to access in-depth campaign reporting and unlock valuable insights about your website visitors.

This functionality provides greater insights into how ad campaigns are impacting business goals and enable marketers to make more informed decisions. Optimizing their return on ad spend.

LinkedIn conversion tracking is directly built into your campaigns and these are the conversion tracking metrics available, taken directly from the LinkedIn campaign manager.

Conversion tracking metrics

1 Conversions: The total number of times people took the desired action after clicking on or seeing your ad

2 Post-click conversions: The percentage of clicks on your ad(s) that led to a conversion

3 View-through conversions: The percentage of impressions on your ad(s) that led to a conversion

4 Conversion rate: The percentage of clicks that led to a conversion (conversions divided by clicks)

5 Cost per conversion: The average amount you spent on each conversion (total spent divided by conversions)

6 Total conversion value: The total dollar value of all conversions (value per conversion times conversions). Value can be defined when creating conversions, which is how much you consider each conversion is worth to you.

7 Return on ad spend: The percentage of revenue generated for every dollar spent (total conversion value divided by spend)

8 Conversion by action: The total number of times people took

If you are are wanting to use this conversion tracking on your website. Firstly install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on any website you wish to track and make sure that you have it firing on all pages.

The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a lightweight JavaScript tag that powers conversion tracking, retargeting, and web analytics for LinkedIn ad campaigns.

This is not a difficult process and simply requires you to copy and paste the LinkedIn Java script code into the header of your website or by using a plugin or Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool provided by Google and is just brilliant at being able to control all web tracking scripts from one place.

Here is a link from LinkedIn support to help you with this https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/65513

What’s next?

Well, hopefully, the ability to build specific custom audiences with LinkedIn which can then be retargeted.

Custom audiences will be next I hope!

Here is a blog I wrote earlier this year about the Changes on LinkedIn 2017 – Click here to read 

What's New on LinkedIn Four more new features to keep you up-to-date!

What's New on LinkedIn
New Connection History Feature

One of my beats with LinkedIn is there tagging system or lack of it! LinkedIn is all about relationships, but it is hard to remember where and how you met everyone. Particularly when LinkedIn does not provide an adequate tagging or note taking system.

LinkedIn has just added a new feature which reminds you when you connected with someone, which is a start. This is a good add-on to the information tab. It can help jog the memory as to where you met making engagement easier and when messaging to re-connect.

You can find the feature on the right-hand side under Contact and Personal Info see image

One thing that would be very useful, if LinkedIn provided an area of a few lines below this where we can write notes or add customised tags.

What's New on LinkedIn
Multiple photos

You can now upload multiple photos from your camera library into one post.

Simple select several photos from your camera roll at one time and push upload.

This function is currently for iOS only.

Android and desktop are coming soon so I believe.

What's New on LinkedIn
Turn off Comments on your Posts

You can now disable comments on your posts. To do this simply go to any of your posts and click on the ellipse [3 square dots] to the top right of the post and click disable comments, as shown in the image below.

What's New on LinkedIn
Active Status – LinkedIn Messaging

With the new active status in your messaging, you can now choose the best time to contact your connections.

Here's how you tell – the little green dot tells all!

If the dot is a solid green by your connections name that means they are online, on LinkedIn and active. What a great time to start a conversation 🙂

If the green dot looks like a green circle that means that they are on their mobile and will be notified of your message.

If you want to alter who can see and who can't see when you're active, go to your Settings then under Profile Policy, Manage active status.

What's New on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is evolving, changing and innovating which is good to see as it is the best business platform in the world. But it was getting left behind by some of the other social platforms.

Now we can see ways that LinkedIn is improving without losing the essence of this professional LinkedIn platform. 

I for one, hope for many more changes to come.

If you want to learn how to stand out on Linkedin click the image below…

I am curious, what do you think of the updates? Are you using them? Do you have all of them live yet?