SOCIAL
LinkedIn Adds Live-Streaming for Company Pages and New ‘Invite to Follow’ Options
Almost a year after first launching its native live-streaming option to selected users, LinkedIn is now expanding LinkedIn Live to company pages, while its also officially adding a new option to invite personal first-degree connections to follow a business page that you manage.
The most significant update here is the expansion of LinkedIn Live – as per LinkedIn:
“LinkedIn Live has helped members and organizations foster dialogues with their communities. That’s why brands have seen 7X more reactions and 24X more comments vs. standard video posts on LinkedIn. […] As part of our continued investment, we’re delighted to bring LinkedIn Live to Pages so that organizations can leverage sight, sound and motion to humanize their brand’s voice on LinkedIn.”
Up till now, LinkedIn Live has only been available in the US, but now, LinkedIn is expanding the functionality to, theoretically, any company page – though page managers will still need to apply for access.
The expansion makes sense – in addition to the above engagement stats for live videos on LinkedIn, LinkedIn users are also 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post.
And LinkedIn has already seen some interesting uses of its streaming tool:
Given the performance of video content on the platform, it makes sense for brands to consider how they might be able to incorporate LinkedIn live-streaming into their approach – maybe for events, product launches, etc. If there’s a fit, you can apply for access to LinkedIn Live here.
LinkedIn also says that it will soon support video streaming via third-party tools, including Restream, Wirecast and Socialive.
In addition to this, LinkedIn has also officially announced that it’s bringing back the option for company page admins to invite their first-degree connections to follow their page.
“You’ve shared that one of the biggest pain points of building a brand is increasing your numbers of engaged and relevant followers. With ‘Invite to Follow’, you can now invite first-degree Profile connections to follow your organization’s Page and grow your organization’s audience.”
The revamped option was actually spotted by social media expert Matt Navarra back in November, and since then, it’s gone back and forth in terms of whether it’s available to certain company pages or not at any given time. Just recently, LinkedIn informed me that the option was undergoing some improvements based on user feedback, which meant that some admins would no longer be able to see it.
Now, it seems like everyone will get access – though there are some qualifiers on its usage:
- Only page admins with fewer than 500 connections are able to invite all their connections via a ‘Select all’ option. Admins with more than 500 connections need to manually select who they want to invite.
- Only company pages with fewer than 100,000 followers can invite members to follow via the option
- If an admin has less than 3 connections, they won’t have the option available
- Only one invite per member can be sent
- Page admins can only invite 50 new people per day
LinkedIn also notes that members can opt-out of receiving any Page invitations at any time via their Network settings.
And lastly, LinkedIn is also making it easier to share content from your company page via your personal LinkedIn profile with a new toggle option to choose which entity you’re posting from.
That’ll no doubt lead to more slip-ups, with people unintentionally posting personal updates from their company page, and vice versa, but it could come in handy for those looking to maintain active company and personal profiles concurrently.
While none of these updates is ground-breaking, as such – there are no major functional leaps or big system improvements – each of these changes could have significant impacts, and could make it easier for you to build your LinkedIn presence.
LinkedIn says that all of these updates are rolling out from this week, so if you’re not seeing them yet, you will shortly (except in the case of LinkedIn Live, for which you need to apply for access).