LinkedIn, the professional career-minded network has been busy over the last few months creating features for businesses to increase engagement with their target audience.

LinkedIn Live

LinkedIn Live is a live video streaming service that was released in early February on the LinkedIn platform as an invite-only beta version for US users. This new feature comes 18 months after LinkedIn began supporting video. The invite-only beta is now accepting applications from creators who wish to participate in the testing. Live is slowly rolling out to those who have applied. Unsure when Live will be available for all users. I’m guessing towards the end of this year.

Reactions

Based on feedback from users, LinkedIn along with the Like has rolled out 4 new reactions – Celebrate, Love, Insightful and Curious. These reactions give users another way to share their feelings about the content shared on the LinkedIn feed. Like 👍is such a reflexive condition for most users. Having these reactions not only conveys a more pronounced way for users to share their thoughts about a post but provides more specific feedback to the person sharing the content. My only negative reaction is the muted colors of the icons.

Recommended Posts in Groups

Group owners and managers can share useful, important, valuable content with group members using recommended group posts. This is an opportunity to keep members informed about the latest conversations and important news in the community.

1. Navigate to the Groups homepage.
2. Click the More icon at the top of the post you want to recommend.

• Click Recommend this post.
• Click Recommend confirming your selection.
• Group members will be notified about the recommended post. Note: The only notification I’ve seen is through the LinkedIn feed.

It would be nice to see the actual post in the LinkedIn feed notification. I don’t like blindly clicking on something. Speaking of clicking, there is no defined link to click.

Here’s some more information about recommended group notifications from LinkedIn Help:

• To prevent spam and unwanted notifications, the number of members receiving notifications will vary. Members will receive notifications dependent on proprietary algorithms that are specific to each member’s notification frequency and whether they have chosen to opt out of these types of notifications.
• Only one post can be recommended per group every seven days.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Create a weekly roundup of interesting posts.
  
• Share announcements of important information or events.
  
• Highlight interesting or trending conversations.

Content Suggestions for Pages

Recently rolled out to Pages (no longer called LinkedIn Company Pages), the content suggestions tab allows page admins to discover and share content that their member community is engaging with. This feature creates an easy way for admins to engage with their target audience.

On the left side of the content suggestions, you can filter content by Audience, Industry, Location, Job function or Seniority.

Note: At least one filter must be selected to receive suggested content. You can use multiple filters at a time, but the estimated audience must remain above 300 members. Suggestions within each filter are based on your Page visitors.

In the top section of the Page, you can select a pre-populated Topic or add one to target your suggestions further. Use the Sort by dropdown to sort your results by Most Recent, Most Engagement and Least Engagement.

To share a piece of content, click the Share button. A new window opens that allows you to share the content on your page, adding in any hashtags, mentions or opinions about the content.