There’s no doubt that LinkedIn is successful. First of all, two new members sign up every second, making it one of the fastest growing social networks on the web. Second of all, an astounding 84% of users were able to use the site to generate several business opportunities. Despite these clear successes, it’s become apparent to LinkedIn that it functions primarily as an online résumé for too many users, and not as the professional networking opportunity it’s intended to be.
Such a conflict has prompted the social network to create the Content Marketing Score tool and Trending Content tool, which will hopefully improve their user engagement and content marketing efforts.
Technically speaking, the Content Marketing Score tool tells businesses just how effective their content marketing strategy really is. It measures how much unique engagement that personal content generates and then divides the amount of engagement by the total target audience. In LinkedIn’s own words, it’s “an analytics resource that gives you insight into the impact of your paid and organic content on LinkedIn.”
The new Trending Content, on the other hand, isn’t so much a tool as it is a marketing resource. It’s section with ranked topics that LinkedIn thinks users will respond most to and groups them into such categories as: high tech, IT, automotive, health and pharmaceuticals, students, executives, financial services, small businesses, and venture capitalism. Clicking on one of these topics yields its own respective list of the most shared, related articles on the network, and also the top sub-topics of that particular topic, too.
These new assets will help businesses to track user engagement–not just impressions–for more accurate assessments of their content marketing approaches. LinkedIn offers businesses demographic data unlike other social networks, which lets marketers zero in on the most relevant, target consumers and businesses.
Though online marketers hail content as king, it’s often a strategy based on trial-and-error. According to the Content Mraketing Institute, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing, yet just 42% believe that they’re actually use it effectively. With LinkedIn’s new tools, companies will be able to improve their strategies’ efficacy, or at least take out some of this guesswork.
