LinkedIn is adding some new tools for brands to help boost their organic promotion efforts on the platform, while also facilitating more connection with colleagues within the LinkedIn experience.

As you can see in the video, the first addition is a new 'My Company' tab on LinkedIn company pages, which will include 'Recommend' and 'Content Suggestions' listings, enabling businesses to facilitate direct sharing of relevant posts, and increase internal engagement with such among employees.

As explained by LinkedIn:

"Page admins can now curate organic content through a new “Recommend” tool and suggest trending articles for employees to reshare through “Content Suggestions”. We’ve also added a new Analytics feature that allows you to measure the reach and impact of your employee advocacy program."

These tools were originally a part of LinkedIn's Elevate employee advocacy program, which LinkedIn has been gradually expanding into its other offerings. In 2019, LinkedIn integrated Elevate functionality into Sales Navigator, enabling Sales Navigator users to get alerts from Elevate within their Navigator dashboard, then last January, LinkedIn announced its plans to bring more of Elevate's employee advocacy platform into its regular company pages experience.

This latest update will provide a range of new opportunities to establish a more integrated, targeted approach to your branding efforts on the platform, utilizing the profiles and personal reach of your employees to spread your messaging.

Indeed, LinkedIn notes that employees are 60% more likely to engage with posts from coworkers (versus regular members), and 14x more likely to share their organization's Page content versus that of another brand.

That's a significant opportunity, and these new tools will provide more ways for businesses to tap into these existing content behaviors, and also measure the results of those efforts.

LinkedIn has also announced a handy new addition for its Product Pages, which it first unveiled in December.

"Today, we’re excited to bring Lead Gen Forms right to your Product Page - for free. Lead Gen Forms let you drive more high-quality leads through pre-filled forms populated with a member’s LinkedIn profile data. When a member clicks on one of your products, their LinkedIn profile information automatically populates an in-app form that they can submit instantly - without having to type in their info by hand."

LinkedIn's Product Pages, which enable businesses to create listings of products and services that they offer for display on their company page, could provide new opportunity to promote specific products, and connect with LinkedIn's audience. The option is not available to all company pages as yet (only B2B software products are able to be listed at this stage), but LinkedIn says that over 10,000 companies have posted more than 12,000 products to 'the Product Pages ecosystem' thus far.

The capacity to gather leads, for free, from the tool could make it a significantly more valuable option for marketers moving forward, opening up new avenues for ad targeting, research, audience segmentation, etc.

And finally, LinkedIn has also officially announced that all company pages will now be able to post LinkedIn Stories, with every business additionally able to add 'swipe-up' links to their Stories frames.

LinkedIn launched the first stage of Stories for individual users last May, and has gradually brought to tool to most regions. Now, LinkedIn company pages can also get in on the act - though neither of these announcements is entirely new.

We reported back in January that LinkedIn had launched the option to add links into your LinkedIn Stories, with the capacity listed on LinkedIn's Help page as being available to all company pages back then. Adding links to your stories is only available to individual LinkedIn members "who have at least 5,000 connections or followers and the Follow button as the primary action on their profile (instead of Connect)."

So it's not completely new, at least for some businesses. But LinkedIn says that it's now available to all, while you can also see how many people have viewed your Stories and swiped through to your URLs by tapping the eye icon at the bottom left of each Stories frame (stats layout in the last frame above).

We've actually been experimenting with the swipe-up links in LinkedIn Stories for a few weeks, and the click-through rates have been pretty low (SMT has over 53k followers on LinkedIn). But then again, it's still relatively early days for LinkedIn Stories, and the brand awareness benefits could be more significant than the metrics can show.

Either way, it's another consideration for your process, with a direct tracking tool to measure your Stories' performance. 

These are some good additions from LinkedIn, which provide more ways to maximize your brand's on-platform presence. And definitely, with economic activity set to see a resurgence in the second half of the year, LinkedIn is expected to get a lot more attention, building on its already record-high levels of engagement.

Couple these new tools with LinkedIn's efforts to build a new freelance marketplace, and you can imagine that activity levels are only going to ramp up, which could make LinkedIn an even more important channel for digital marketing.