As I’m sure we all noticed, well maybe not, in early July LinkedIn launched a new home page design with a simpler and easier to navigate home page including an easier way to find their ads section.
LinkedIn's goal was to allow users to easily scan and find relevant information and push current stories and updates to the top of the page. This sounds vaguely Facebook Timeline-ish.
New Feature Highlights:
Beyond the cosmetic look of LinkedIn they have released some new features including:
- News feed suggestions based on your industry and companies you like
- Latest updates from people in your network are at the top of the page
- You can filter your stream of updates by any number of factors including: shares, groups, connections, etc.
- Images in posts are bigger and more engaging
- Targeted updates which allow you to post updates to specific audiences including by: location, seniority, industry, function and employer. This will allow you as a marketer to send the right message to the right audience without having to have the end user sort through the rest.
LinkedIn also is attempting to provide more analytics information about who your company’s followers are and who has viewed your page. As companies look to leverage LinkedIn, and the LinkedIn ad network, which has a bit of a bad reputation, analytics is becoming a larger focus. Marketers want to understand who is following them in order to better target ads at those who are likely to use the social platform to stay connected.
LinkedIn is not the big, sexy social networks like Facebook or Twitter, so will changing their platform to match Facebook’s timeline be a hit or a miss? Only time will tell if these changes will help to make LinkedIn more engaging and how this will affect how users use LinkedIn.