Video: Four LinkedIn Updates September 20, 2021

Check out the latest video from our founder, Amanda Gregory, about the latest updates LinkedIn is making and how this affects the world of marketing and social media.

Transcript is below.

Transcript:

So, some interesting things happening as always in the world of marketing. But today, I wanted to share a couple of things that are happening specifically within the world of LinkedIn and marketing.

I have four little tidbits to share.

First of all, you might have noticed that LinkedIn awhile ago rolled out a new feature called Stories. Very much like the stories you're used to seeing on Instagram and Facebook. (That first came from Snapchat.) Anyway, you know what, I always thought about the stories was I was wondering like, who is doing this? Well, I was struggling figuring out the right use case for LinkedIn Stories.

And the reason is, is that when you're putting out business content, even if it's more casual like this, just, you know, here's some news. I think you don't want it to disappear after 24 hours. You want it to stay so that you can go back and say, okay, this is what I talked about last time. So, like I said, I hadn't seen anybody doing it really well. I don't know if it's just became a feature creep, sort of thing for LinkedIn or what. But, anyway, interesting to see. They just took it away and they are no longer having this feature. Next is the LinkedIn Creator funds.

So, LinkedIn has been coming out and saying, we really want to put our money where our mouth is when it comes to supporting creators on this platform. There are a lot of opportunities, specifically for people to talk about, things that happen in the business world in a professional setting. And so LinkedIn is really putting a lot of emphasis behind supporting this. And so they have launched new features to do this. They will be doing seminars and webinars that sort of thing as well. Well, they just announced that they are doing a Creator Accelerator. Where you can apply to be a part of this and then you can learn directly from LinkedIn about growing your platform, how to better, to use the platform that sort of thing. So I believe applications are open right now until October 12th. So it’s really good to see them doing that. I actually really believe in the opportunity and the space too. I think it'll be really great to see how this all develops.

The next thing I have is if you're familiar with Clubhouse. So Clubhouse is a social media platform. That was launched last year. It really, I think became more prominent and more talked about towards the end of last year, beginning of this year. I think they did a dynamite launch because it was very exclusive, you had to be invited and it was not easy to get invited. They also did some stuff just that was very different. In terms of the way you had to start on the platform. You had to put your contact information in and let them read that. You had to enable notifications on your phone. Anyway, I digress.

But what I thought was interesting about Clubhouse when I was using it more, I was really using it for business content. So I would log on to hear if a prominent business leader that I was interested in hearing talk or a marketer hop on and talk about a specific subject. So what was so great about it is, you would know kind of who the people on the panel would be and then you could, as a user hop into a room until it got full. And so I actually think it makes a lot of sense for LInkedIn to do this because LinkedIn is already a place where you can do webinars and, see people's videos that sort of thing, but I think it really makes a lot of sense to have a sort of live podcast, Newsradio sort of atmosphere where you can log-in and then really hear what's happening live and hear these people's voices and hear them off the cuff. Answer questions that come up in the conversation. So I'm really interested to see how that develops and we'll be checking it out. As soon as I start to see that pop up.

Last of all is the fact that now pages, pages owned by brands or companies can published articles. So you might remember that, if before, if you have ever published content (in the form of an article), and you're writing it for your company, you had to put it on your personal profile. So I am Amanda Gregory. Even if I was writing something for my company Kafen8, I still had to put articles on my Amanda Gregory profile. Now LinkedIn has changed that so that Brands and companies that have Pages can do the same. And the reason I really like that is, I think it really opens up the opportunity for people to have deeper engagement experience.

So Brands can put deeper content out there than just their posts or their “We’re Hiring” posts, or “here's a link to our post off the blog”, off LinkedIn and on our own blog type of content. Now, they can actually do that within the platform. So I think that it gives them an opportunity to show off their deeper side and then people who are reading their content to, really see that deeper side and have this kind of larger deeper conversation, It’s so exciting to see that happen also as a company owner, it's just nice that I can have a choice to put out content either on my company page, or on my personal profile.

Oh. And the other thing too. I meant, I meant to mention is from a LinkedIn standpoint. It makes a lot of sense because brands that were putting out content, were putting links to their own websites, and so now LinkedIn can keep people on the platform longer, if they want to be reading this content, they will stay on that platform. And so it really feels like a win - win - win for companies. A win for people who are following and engaging and then also, a win for the platform. So that's what I've got for this week and I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on this: Did anybody have a use case for stories that they're like, “Stories made a lot of sense for them, and they’re really bummed? Curious to hear kind of people's thoughts about the Creator fund and this new kind of Clubhouse Space. Is it really a “Me, too” kind of “I'm going to do this as well”? Or does it make sense for it to be there? So let me know what you think and would love to have a conversation about it in the comments. Hope you're having a great week.