LinkedIn rolls out several new features

In an effort to keep people engaged and help its users generate better business leads, LinkedIn has rolled out a series of new features for LinkedIn Pages. All of which were introduced relatively quietly and with little fanfare, though it could have made a big difference to engagement and to target more qualified leads.

LinkedIn confirmed the following new features earlier this week:

• Lead Gen Forms in Product Pages
• Ways to share content among coworkers in the ‘My Community’ tab
• Ways to measure the impact of employee advocacy on content engagement & reach

The new Lead Gen forms that can be added to LinkedIn Product Pages are expected to be popular. As the name suggests, a Product Page on LinkedIn is a useful resource that can be used to advertise specific products or services, allowing potential customers to access the information and the business questions about it.

With the new Lead Gen forms, a call to action can be included on the product page which upon being clicked will automatically populate a Lead Gen form with the details of the user. This will include their job title, location, company name, full name, LinkedIn profile information and seniority etc.

All of which will be entered automatically prior to being sent to the company.  Incentives can also be offered to encourage LinkedIn users to populate and submit these forms, such as a free coupon, a digital discount card or something of a similar nature.

“My company” Updates

The new features within the “My Company” tab have also earned plenty of early praise, which has been introduced to drive employee engagement.

LinkedIn has introduced a ‘Recommend’ feature that lets admins suggest trending articles and curate organic content, in order to be recommended to employees.

According to LinkedIn, employees are exponentially more likely to take an interest in content that has been recommended by their own company directly, as opposed to that which is suggested from other sources.

“Internal LinkedIn research shows that employees are 60% more likely to engage with posts from coworkers vs. non-coworkers, and 14x more likely to share their organization’s Page content vs. other brands’ content.”

To verify whether or not this is the case, the My Company tab will now feature a new analytics section to measure the reach and engagement of content recommended to employees.

New service for hiring freelancers

In related news, unconfirmed reports suggest that LinkedIn could shortly be introducing a new service designed to help companies locate and hire freelancers for projects. LinkedIn apparently has every intention of claiming its share of this lucrative online marketplace, which for many years has been dominated by the same handful of major players.

The sheer size, reach and popularity of LinkedIn could see it becoming the biggest name in the freelance service provision landscape online, though the move is yet to be confirmed by LinkedIn itself.