LinkedIn launches insights tools to help advertisers measure and benchmark content marketing strategies

LinkedIn’s CMS measures how effectively a brand’s content is engaging its audience on LinkedIn by looking at the various points of contact across the platform including a brand’s company page, groups, sponsored updates, employee updates and influencer posts.

Brands can then compare their score against an anonymised set of competitors, and filter their score by region, seniority, company size, job function and industry, to help them gauge how their campaigns are performing over time.

LinkedIn has simultaneously unveiled its ‘Trending Content’ tool, which tracks and ranks what topics are popular with LinkedIn members, from leadership and entrepreneurship to cloud computing and mobile devices.

Josh Graff, director of LinkedIn marketing solutions, EMEA, told The Drum that the professional networking platform now generates six times the amount of page impressions through content – a figure which has “tipped” from being predominantly focused on jobs posts for its main content.

“There is a real thirst for professional content among consumers, and we have invested heavily in research and development over the last few years and have seen that content marketing has become the leading tactic for marketers. But many aren’t able to quantify the impact of their content marketing strategies, which is why we are launching the Content marketing Score,” he said.

The score, which is designed to help marketers measure and benchmark their content against peer sets will help marketers “quantify influence” that they have on the platform, while the Trending tool can help highlight which areas need improvement and which are generating strong engagement in comparison to that brand’s peer set.

Marketers can also view which topics of content are trending in their target audience group.

The tool, available from today (27 March), has been welcomed by brands. BP social media director Ben Jefferies told The Drum the launch is a “game changer” for how LinkedIn is used because marketers can now for the first time benchmark their content strategies against rivals and justify whether certain strategies are working or not.

“Otherwise everyone on the platform is just doing their own thing in their own little box, and they may think they are doing it right but will have no idea if they are. So they could be pumping huge amounts of energy into sponsored updates, or content updates and it not being effective. I don’t know of anything Facebook or Twitter do that is comparable to that,” he said.

He added that both the CMS and the Trending tool will help him justify to his senior management why BP is investing in and developing a social media strategy.

“With any social media management software you get analytics – we get them from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, but those analytics are in isolation – they tell us how our content is performing but I don’t know whether that’s good or bad – I don’t get analytics from our competitors, or peers or best in class so I don’t know whether our reach or engagement is good versus others.

“I can look at the type of comments we’re getting and dig into that but unless I dig into other people’s pages and look at their comments too I can’t see if we are getting good engagement or not. That’s why what LinkedIn is doing in terms of building this comparative tool is going to become really powerful.

“I can then take that to my management Because the question they always ask is why are we doing this – why are we doing social media? And I don’t want to have to answer – because we have to. I can now show them over a monthly or quarterly basis what content we are producing on LinkedIn and this is how we are performing on that content versus other people, and I can also then use the metrics which are more generic to us,” he said.

According to LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score, the global industries most effectively engaging LinkedIn members are:

1. High tech

2. Media

3. Professional services

4. Financial services

5. Education

6. Manufacturing

7. Consumer

8. Recreational

9. Medical

10. Transportation