LinkedIn Adds New Tools for Company Pages, Including Employee Notifications Option

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The first element is employee notifications, a new way to let your company employees on LinkedIn know about important business updates or posts, and prompt them to share with their own networks.

As explained by LinkedIn:

"Your employees can be your most powerful advocates, but many businesses don’t know where to begin. With Employee Notifications, Page Admins can now alert employees of important posts, which employees can then engage with or share to their LinkedIn network. This makes it easy for your employees to share your organization’s content and amplify your messages." 

As you can see in the above video, once you choose to notify your employees of a specific post, LinkedIn will add a prompt to the alerts listing of each of your company's listed employees on the platform. That will ensure that they're aware of the update, and prompt them to share with their own network.

And that should be a significant consideration for all brands - previous research has shown that content shared by employees sees 8x more engagement, on average, than content shared through branded channels. 

But it could also become spammy, with brands prompting their listed staff to share over and over again, filling up their notifications. To counter this, LinkedIn has put a limit on such notifications to once per week - so you can use it to promote your LinkedIn posts, but make sure they're your best ones. LinkedIn recently introduced similar content prompts in Sales Navigator, linked to LinkedIn Elevate. 

It's a good idea, and the usage restrictions should ensure that it's used in a measured way, but it would also be helpful if Company Page admins could remove staff on their lists who aren't actually employees.

LinkedIn enables anyone to list themselves as an employee of any company, and while there are ways to report people who claim to be employees who are not, it's a manual process, which takes time and effort to go through. 

Having the capacity to prompt non-employees with your key company updates isn't necessarily a bad thing - if they want to amplify your content they can - but it may also enable them to continue to present themselves as staff members by including them in the internal loop.

The next new LinkedIn company page addition is company page kudos and team moments.

As per LinkedIn:

"With Kudos and Team Moments, Page Admins can leverage a custom content format built specifically to welcome new team members, spotlight outstanding work, and recognize the people behind an organization’s pivotal moments. By highlighting the people behind your brand, you reveal the human side of your organization to prospective customers and employees."

As you can see here, the new option provides a dedicated post format for these announcements, which could help to separate them in feed listings, while also prompting engagement through an additional, highlighted text element within the update - which in this case has been used to add a question for colleagues on the platform.  

And the last element is a new completion meter for LinkedIn company page fields.

According to LinkedIn:

"Complete LinkedIn Pages generate 30% more page views per week compared to incomplete LinkedIn Pages. However, less than 5% of Page Admins with an incomplete Page choose to update it, oftentimes because they don’t know what details they’re missing."

This new option will help to guide users through the process, which is similar to the profile completion meters available on other platforms, and LinkedIn's own 'Profile Strength Meter' for personal listings. 

The additions could prove helpful for brands looking to increase their LinkedIn company page engagement, and boost employee sharing and interaction. How useful they'll be will be relative to how you choose to use them, but there is clear potential benefit to each of these new tools.