[APRIL 2017] What the Latest LinkedIn Changes Mean for Marketers and Business Owners

If it’s been a while since you’ve checked your LinkedIn account, you may notice some drastic changes the next time you log in. After being acquired by Microsoft last year, the social media platform for professionals decided to continue to shake things up in 2017 by unveiling the most dramatic redesign in the platform’s decade-and-a-half history.

LinkedIn doesn’t have the best user engagement stats compared to other social media sites. Only 23 percent of LinkedIn’s 467 million users visit the site each month according to the company’s 2016 third quarter fiscal report. This latest redesign is their effort to give those numbers a boost.

But the redesign was more than just a cosmetic change, the company made significant upgrades on the front and back end of the site, changing the way a number of features operate. In this post, we’ll take a look at the changes that will affect marketers and business owners the most.

Search

LinkedIn added a convenient search feature during the redesign – you can now complete a search for your keyword or phrase and toggle between pages to see different categories like People, Jobs and Posts.

However, they also hid one on us – you now need to purchase the “Sales Navigator” level of LinkedIn Premium to access the Advanced Search filters that were previously available to everyone. Those missing filters include “years of experience,” “function” and “seniority level.” In our opinion, this will only be of note to those using LinkedIn primarily for recruitment purposes.

Blogging

This section is going to be relevant to anyone that published articles or long-form posts on LinkedIn. The update makes it so you can post right from the main site rather than having to click off to LinkedIn Pulse to write a blog.

For companies without a stand-alone blog site or companies that like to post original content to their different social sites, this feature could be extremely helpful. It could also help to boost LinkedIn’s use as a platform in general if this feature becomes widely used by companies and content creators.

Other Items

A few other items have changed, but won’t be quite as relevant from a business point of view.

• Messaging is now available in chat format (rather than the previous look which had more of an email look to it).
• The homepage feed has a cleaner look and additional information available to users.
• Profile layouts have been updated and rearranged.
• You can find more information and settings under your account info than with the previously format.

These will help to make the site more user-friendly and hopefully boost traffic to more than monthly visits for users.