The go-to platform for making professional connections has gotten a major interactive overhaul. Already considered a professional weapon in networking and notability, the social media site has always lacked an element of excitement, almost serving purely as an interactable resume. A big change has arrived in 2021 with the platform following in the footsteps of its older siblings, Facebook and Instagram to introduce an array of new features to make it a real contender to consider with digital marketing.

The motivation behind these changes is to further establish potential connections for your personal career development as well as aiding in engaging your network through more advanced controls surrounding what and how you post. These adaptations aim to bring LinkedIn up to speed among other social media juggernauts Instagram and Facebook to transform it into a key tool in not only building connections but implementing control over what content gets seen where and by who.

Stories:

LinkedIn introduced stories to its site, in a similar style to Instagram, LinkedIn has allowed mobile users to upload stories to their business pages as well as tagging users and embedding links for users to swipe up on. This is an attempt to encourage organic growth for smaller businesses as anyone can utilise this feature as opposed to Instagram where you need a certain number of followers.
The spin that LinkedIn has put on their stories to differentiate it from Instagram is for users still working from home to have the imitation workplace conversations they would have with colleagues to bring back an immersive workplace culture to their new routines.

Ad placement for LinkedIn is also new, which businesses can then shift the focus of their strategy from their feed to their stories as users are recorded to be spending less time scrolling through their feed, in fact users are up to 15 times more likely to see a story on LinkedIn instead of a standard post on their feed.

Post Visibility:

User’s now get more choice with who sees their posts as well. They get the option for their posts to be accessible publicly, to logged in LinkedIn users or only by their connections. This feature imitates Facebooks post options and the desired level of privacy or publicity of what businesses post. One further element of this feature now allows users to post directly into a specific group without having to also post it on their personal feed. These features are introduced with the aim of enhancing engagement and relevancy to their targeted audience.

Comment Control:

To extend on from post visibility, user’s can now also display a level of control over the comments on their post with the options to allow no comments, just your connections or all comments. This feature benefits from LinkedIn’s established image of being trustworthy and has been introduced in an attempt to limit spam comments that take away from the original post’s relevancy and only display comments that are relevant to the user’s it is aimed at.
This goes hand in hand with LinkedIn taking the top spot for Business Insider’s most trusted social media site, being ranked number 1 for 4 consecutive years, which in itself is impressive enough but goes to highlight the brand’s dedication to continue their efforts to emphasise the reliability and security of their platform.

Admin Levels:

A new key feature developed especially for organisations is the ability to allocate admins at newly introduced admin levels. These levels include an overarching admin called a super admin, a content admin as well as admins that are only allowed to create sponsored posts. Further emphasis on control over your personal account is the benefit that you do not need to be connected to a user first in order to make them an admin of a company.

Featured Content Section:

In a change from only being shown specific suggestions that users you follow would interact with on your featured section, the updates contain an added suggestion of company milestones such as new hires, anniversaries of employees at that company as well as recent promotions.
This feature is most useful for larger businesses with multiple employees making it effective to track positive developments within staff that can be used to reinforce a positive workplace culture.
Company news is also a new development enabling you to get a notification whenever your company is addressed in the news.

To sum it up, LinkedIn is getting a big face lift in a few departments. It is evident that the changes to controllability with comments and administration levels is to reaffirm users with the security of the platforms ability to function in a similar fashion as the classic go-to social media sites that we’ve all come to know and rely on over the years. This is a huge leap for the future of professional networking to create relatable and personal content for the added ability to market yourself, not just your business.