Improve Your Reach With Refreshed New Design By LinkedIn

LinkedIn just rolled out a refreshed new design, and it’s creating exciting new opportunities for online marketing and franchise development. Today’s post explains 3 ways to improve your reach with the new and improved LinkedIn platform.

Linkedin Announces Refreshed New Design Late Last Month

It’s been more than five years since LinkedIn’s last major redesign, and a lot has changed since then.

Where LinkedIn was once considered a more “passive” professional network, where users only really logged on to upload, update, or investigate profiles, it has since transformed into a highly active community comprising more than 700 million professionals around the world.

Indeed, over the last five years, we’ve seen LinkedIn signals soar through the roof. Members now share content in record numbers, send hundreds of thousands of direct messages every day, and consume more than one-million hours of LinkedIn Learning content every week. In 2019 alone, nearly five billion connects were made across the platform, and according to internal LinkedIn figures, 3 people are hired every second through the community.

Late last month, LinkedIn announced a major redesign project was underway in hopes of creating a warmer experience that embodies its active, diverse, and inclusive community. Several new features were also introduced—some of which could change the face of social media marketing as we know it.

Key Features Introduced With The Linkedin Redesign

Key changes put forth in the LinkedIn redesign include:

• Streamlined search experience that makes it easier to find the talent, events, and content you want, when you want it
• Accessibility features to bring the LinkedIn experience in-line with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, including a much-anticipated dark mode
• New and improved visual elements to showcase different skills, backgrounds, and work experiences
• A new “Open to Work” feature, which lets talent show their availability at-a-glance by way of a LinkedIn profile photo frame
• A professional “Stories” feature that allows users to connect more personally by sharing real moments in real-time, ala Instagram, Facebook, and SnapChat
• Integrated Video Call feature to kick off video meetings using Microsoft Teams, BlueJeans by Verizon, or Zoom directly from your LinkedIn messages

But what does this mean for your business or franchise? How can we use these new features to expand your marketing reach?

Let’s discuss a few options…

Option #1: Find A New Home For Your High-performance Marketing Content

If you’ve invested time or money to produce high-performance marketing content—the kind that truly resonates with your target audience and captures the essence of your brand—you need to publish it on every active platform possible. In addition to publishing this content on your blog, and repurposing it for landing pages and marketing campaigns, we recommend posting on LinkedIn as well.

Back in 2016, LinkedIn content feeds were already generating more than 9 billion impressions every week, about 15-times the amount of job postings, foreshadowing the brand’s shift from passive professional network to active online community and evidencing the quality of their readership. Since then, that readership has only grown, and there has been a 50% increase in LinkedIn content creation over the past year to meet this new demand!

With the recent improvements to the search experience, your best content will enjoy newfound reach and be easier for loyal readers to find. Users can now use additional filters on the same page as their initial search results to find your content faster than ever. In addition to these new keyword filters, company filters, and industry filters for desktop and mobile users, LinkedIn has added a “People Also Viewed” feature that can increase organic views for your material.

LinkedIn’s redesign is also making it easier for your content to stand out, with most of the classic “LinkedIn Blue” stripped away from the UI to leave room for your logos, visuals, and message to stand front-and-center.

Option #2: Leverage Fresh Features For Franchise Development Campaigns

If you’re looking for ways to rev up your franchise development in 2020-2021, start with LinkedIn. Not only has LinkedIn’s user-culture shift from passive professional network to active community increased the number of eyes that see your opportunity in a given day, but a number of new features give your franchise development an extra boost:

• Streamlined search helps prospects find franchise development opportunities that they want, with keyword, company, and industry filters increasing search relevance
• The integrated video call feature gives franchise development teams new tools to connect with (or screen) prospects early in the sales cycle
• LinkedIn Stories gives franchisors the opportunity to share details about their opportunities in a more humanized, engaging, and lightweight fashion.
• Using the Localized Stickers feature, creators can also geo-target their LinkedIn Stories to appeal to specific demographics
• Updates to LinkedIn Messaging makes conversations with “hot prospects” even easier and more effective, as users can manage messages in bulk (i.e. select multiple messages to archive, delete, or mark as read), edit/delete messages after being sent, quickly react to messages with emojis, or switch directly to video meetings for face-to-face interactions

Option #3: Put Engaging Video Or Photo Content In Front Of New Audiences

Compared to text, video and photo content tends to be much more engaging, especially for social media users in “scroll mode.” For this reason, many businesses invest in the production of custom video or photo content to improve their reach. But if you’re not sharing this media on the newly redesigned LinkedIn platform, you’re missing major opportunities.

Business owners can now record or upload video content up to 20-seconds long to post on their LinkedIn Stories. These videos can then be further enhanced using localized stickers, on-screen text, or by tagging relevant users (e.g. customers, employees, or businesses featured in the video). You can also use these videos to pose questions to your audience, which is equally useful whether you’re trying to gain deeper insights or simply make your message more engaging.

With more than 700 million professionals now on LinkedIn, and more app activity being seen than ever before, not publishing your visual content there would be a huge mistake!

Learn More About Improving Your Reach On Linkedin In 2020-2021

We’ve touched on a few strategies to help you take advantage of LinkedIn’s much anticipated redesign, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface! To learn more about how we can improve your reach this year, get in touch with our franchise marketing experts by calling 866-311-7189 or booking online via the ClickTecs website.