LinkedIn Elevate Leverages Employees For Content Sharing
Rule number one of content marketing is to create engaging, valuable and shareable content. At the same time, it’s just as important to make sure that content gets as much visibility as possible by publishing it through various social and professional channels.
When it comes to posting on social media, however, it’s getting harder and harder to get your content seen – even if you’re using paid options. For companies on LinkedIn, a new app could help increase exposure by making it easy for employees to recommend content that promotes visibility on the network.
Posting Content Leads to Exposure on LinkedIn
Launching this week, LinkedIn Elevate promises to seriously increase engagement with brands on LinkedIn through content. In a blog post, LinkedIn product manager Will Sun explains how simply posting content on LinkedIn can lead to page views, connections and company page followers. For companies that deal especially in B2B realms, more followers on LinkedIn can lead to some great leads, sales and even hires. According to Sun:
- For every six pieces of content a person shares on LinkedIn, they receive an average of six profile views and two new connections.
- Sharing six pieces of content also leads to an average of three views and one follower for the poster’s Company Page.
- Only two percent of employees share content posted by their company.
- When a company posts a piece of content, 20 percent of the shares, likes, comments and clicks come from employees.
- Employees tend to have about 10 times more connections than their associated company has followers.
With these stats in mind, it becomes clear that companies could gain much more visibility on LinkedIn if their employees shared more content. After all, people tend to engage much more with content posted by users instead of companies. Content posted by brands, especially if it’s sponsored, is notoriously distrusted by typical social media users.
Advantages and Disadvantages
LinkedIn Elevate will make use of existing services including Newsle and Pulse to make algorithmic content recommendations to users. This will give a company’s employees a constant stream of relevant content from which to choose. Then can then easily post any chosen content to LinkedIn or Twitter. Facebook integration is expected to be added later in the year.
LinkedIn Elevate will also provide analytics and tracking information to determine how many times each piece of content has been shared, commented on, or liked, in addition to how many people were reached overall. Eventually, it’s thought that LinkedIn Elevate will be able to display the people who viewed a profile and added connections as the result of posted content.
The advantages of LinkedIn Elevate will hopefully be twofold. Companies will benefit because they’ll leverage the power of real people posting content that’s also associated with their business. Employees will benefit because they’ll likely receive more profile views and connections, leading to great networking and job opportunities.
But it’s not all good news – there are those who believe the new app could contribute to LinkedIn’s already well-known problem with spam. Also, the fact that many more stories could be showing up in users’ news feeds might decrease the app’s effect over time. Right now, the steps that content marketers should take to get their content suggested by LinkedIn Elevate are not exactly clear. The app is currently invitation-only and it will not be free.
What do you think? Does LinkedIn Elevate have potential? Or is it a far cry from more established services like Hootsuite?