LinkedIn has launched a new element of its 'Success Hub' marketing data and insights platform, which aims to provide additional information on specific audiences and verticals, in order to help better inform marketing decisions and understanding.
As explained by LinkedIn:
"With so much data, though, we know it can be difficult to wrap your arms around everything, and pinpoint the most valuable information for your needs. That’s why we are excited to unveil the LinkedIn Insights and Research page, a new feature within our Success Hub for Marketers. Using this handy resource, you’ll be able to guide and substantiate your social media marketing strategy based on comprehensive insights concerning audiences, industry verticals, and the LinkedIn ad landscape."
That may slightly overstate the value on offer here, but it does provide some new ways to locate industry-specific insights and information, based on LinkedIn usage.
in essence, the new Insights and Research hub collects a range of LinkedIn resources into one place, while also mixing in few new, broad-ranging data insights.
First off, LinkedIn outlines the breadth of its current data set, and where it's pulling these insights from.
LinkedIn is actually now up to 645 million members, according to its latest reportage, people who may not be active users, necessarily, but do contribute to its overall database of professional insights.
The main element of the new hub is the People Insights section, which enables marketers to drill-down a little further into key trends of note within specific sectors.
The first step is to choose a vertical, which you can do from the drop-down menu at the top of the main window.
There's not a huge range of options here, but it does enable you to narrow down your data set to specific industries, filtering your insights.
Once chosen, LinkedIn will then provide a set of information on platform usage within that vertical:
This can help improve your marketing, not only by highlighting the key topics of focus, which you may want to explore in your content efforts, but also the key people to tune into, and the brands that are being followed by these professionals on LinkedIn.
It would, of course, be helpful to be able to dig a little deeper into each, but either way, more data is always better, and this provides increased capacity to better understand key trends within your chosen sector.
In addition to this, LinkedIn also provides new hub sections for Industry Insights and Advertising Insights, each of which is essentially a collection of LinkedIn blog posts and resources, which, again, you can sort by vertical.
These sections offer less specific refinement than the People Insights offering, but they do collect all of LinkedIn's resources into one place, making it easier to locate what you need.
The aim of the new hub, according to LinkedIn, is to better enable marketers to target the right audiences on its platform.
"By understanding the makeup/behaviors of your audience, the context of your industry, and the most recommendable practices for LinkedIn advertising, you’ll be poised to make smart decisions geared toward sustainable growth."
There definitely is value in this insight, there are some helpful pointers. But it is also fairly surface level.
LinkedIn has access to the most advanced professional database in history, a vast array of information which can be used to glean in-depth understanding of various trends and happenings. Understandably, LinkedIn isn't looking to give all of that up for free, but it does feel like this new hub could provide a little more in this respect.
But maybe that's coming - maybe LinkedIn is looking to add more information on on-platform hashtag use, real-time content trends, content type insights, etc. Even though LinkedIn likely won't provide a heap of more in-depth data access free of charge, there are ways in which the information presented could be of more value. But even so, there are some good pointers to note in this new element.
You can check out the new LinkedIn Research and Insights Page here.
