Over the past year or so, LinkedIn has been working to develop more insight into the key topics of interests among its user base. This push has included the extra emphasis on the use of hashtags in posts, enabling LinkedIn's systems to better understand what audience subsets want to see more of, what they're discussing, and how LinkedIn can subsequently boost on-platform engagement through such insight.
Earlier this year, LinkedIn added the capacity for Company Pages to list specific hashtags of interest within their page info, further defining key areas of interest. And now, LinkedIn's looking to take those insights to the next stage, by rolling out a new element in its API program which will enable third-party partners to highlight key topics of focus to improve your LinkedIn campaigns.
As explained by LinkedIn:
"Today, we’re excited to announce a new category to the LinkedIn Partner Program - Audience Engagement. Launch partners including Amobee, Annalect, Hootsuite, Ogilvy, and Sprinklr have integrated the LinkedIn Audience Engagement API to create offerings that enable customers and clients to discover new audiences, better understand the types of content those audiences are engaging with and see how your content is performing against industry benchmarks."
As you can see in the above example from Amobee, approved partner platforms will now be able to utilize LinkedIn's audience engagement data to provide additional topic insight, based on on-platform activity. This will help customers of these platforms to better focus their LinkedIn campaigns, with in-depth data, centered specifically around LinkedIn engagement.
The three elements of the new API are:
- Audience discovery. With more than 645M members on LinkedIn, it can be hard to keep track of who you should be engaging with on the platform. Our integration partners enable you to discover new audiences who have high engagement with topics and articles related to your industry. This also helps you discover new groups you can engage with for your next marketing campaign.
- Content recommendations. We’ve also made it easier to discover trending topics and content that your key audiences are engaging with. These insights can help inform your content marketing strategy, helping you know what to post (and whom to target) on LinkedIn.
- Industry benchmarking. Sometimes it’s helpful to know how your content is performing against others in your industry. Now you can better understand the kinds of content your competitors are posting and how their engagement compares against your own. These insights can help optimize your targeting and content strategy.
Such information could be of significant value - as reported by Microsoft, LinkedIn is currently seeing 'record levels of engagement'. If your business could tap into those rising discussions - especially if you're a B2B organization, LinkedIn's specialty - then it could help drive performance, both on and off the platform.
In order to utilize these new insights, you'll need to work with an approved LinkedIn partner - you can find a full listing of LinkedIn partners here. At present, the partner pool for its Audience Engagement API is limited, with LinkedIn keeping a close eye on how its data is used - LinkedIn also notes that these are "aggregated insights that do not identify our members", ensuring that user privacy is kept in focus.
It's another way to tap into improved data capacity to better focus your campaigns.