Since 2003, LinkedIn has been providing practical ways for businesses to market themselves and create meaningful relations with top-notch talent. Today, it boasts over 600 million users, which is why your business will find it useful.
In the COVID-19 era, LinkedIn has come up with several features to provide even more value for your business. Since the beginning of the year, new features have been rolling out to neutralize the negative impacts of the absence of physical meetings. The features aim to enable businesses such as yours to keep in touch with clients and talent and seek opinions on specific topics.
If your business is lagging in communicating with its market, these three LinkedIn features should help keep your best foot forward:
- Polls
After testing throughout April, this feature was officially launched earlier this month. It might appear new, but group polls were on LinkedIn until 2014 when LinkedIn took the out. The latest poll feature is, however, better and easier to use.
To create a poll, a user creates a post then clicks on “Create Poll.” The post creator can then add a question and a maximum of four options and publish the post. The entire process is quite straightforward, taking not more than 30 seconds. After publishing, polls remain online for a minimum of 24 hours and a maximum of two weeks.
While data on polls’ effectiveness hasn’t been made publicly available, there is no doubt they will help keep the engagement between business and market alive. You can ask anything on polls, provided it is within LinkedIn’s Do’s and Don’t’s.
- Events
Events have been around on LinkedIn since October 2019, but they now have two revamps.
First off, the new rollout has the “Create Event” option available on every company page. Earlier on, only select company pages had the feature. Secondly, Virtual Events rolled out a few days ago. Ajay Datta, LinkedIn’s director of product development, characterized this feature as a fusion of LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events.
With Virtual Events, businesses can host live events, eliminating the need for their audiences to be physically present. To demonstrate its power, a company filmed a live fashion show and uploaded the clips to LinkedIn.
The effectiveness of LinkedIn’s Live already exists. Live videos receive 23 times and six times more comments and reactions, respectively. That said, if your business is having a difficult time keeping its audience engaged due to social distancing rules, Virtual Events will prove useful.
- Video Tab
This feature will list all videos shared by a user, including those broadcasted live. According to LinkedIn, the tab will appear on a page, regardless of whether the user has uploaded videos or not.
Presently, the Video Tab isn’t doing much more than displaying videos chronologically, even for admins. However, LinkedIn hints that in the future, more functionality such as video editing may come in. In its current state, editing a video using Video Tab includes making changes offline, deleting an old upload, and replacing it with the new clip.
All in all, this feature will go a long way to helping businesses’ online audiences sample videos on company pages.
Key Takeaway
LinkedIn is ripe and ready for business. It would be unwise to let the coronavirus pandemic rob your business off its power to engage its online market while such powerful features exist. Make a step in the right direction by using expert help to give your business a LinkedIn presence.