How to Personalize Your LinkedIn Page & Humanize Your Brand

An astonishing number of businesses today make use of their LinkedIn pages to connect with a great many potential prospects, customers, and even employees. It is estimated that upwards of 50 million businesses currently make use of their LinkedIn pages for this purpose, and they generally experience a significant level of success. Being aware of this trend, LinkedIn is enhancing features already in existence to facilitate that whole process and help businesses create a greater level of shared experiences, as well as a more profound sense of community. Along these lines, LinkedIn has added capability to features such as Community Hashtags, Kudos and Team Moments, and Employee Notification, all of which increase the ability of businesses to connect with potential contacts, and enrich the relationship between them. Here are some of the ways which you can use your LinkedIn Pages to humanize your brand and make it more appealing to a number of potential prospects.

Invite first-degree connections to follow

It has been known for some time that one of the biggest challenges faced by any brand is to increase its following and to add to the number of engaged users who relate to the brand. One of the best ways to address this is to invite first-degree connections to follow your brand's Page, through processes which are very simple and easy to do.All you have to do is navigate to Admin Tools and select Invite Connections from the list which can be seen in the dropdown box. After having identified select people whom you wish to invite, you just tap on the checkbox opposite their name and then press the Submit button. This will instantly send an invitation to them to follow you. Keep in mind that you will only be able to send out 50 invitations on any given day, and all members will have the option of declining your invitation, if they should so choose.

Use LinkedIn Live for real-time streaming

LinkedIn Live is a feature which gives people and organizations the ability to broadcast real-time video to any community or group of their choosing, or to the entire LinkedIn world. When it was initially launched, most of the subject matter covered by LinkedIn Live was product announcements, conferences, question-and-answer sessions, and other events staged by knowledgeable individuals and influencers.

LinkedIn has partnered with several third-party developers which specialize in live broadcasting streaming services, so that video creators will be able to work with these third parties to produce more polished live video on the platform. Microsoft is also partnering with LinkedIn on this effort, providing encoding services which will help to maintain security, and will effectively enable cloud services to be used.The whole intent of involving third-party partners is to provide businesses with the opportunity to develop professional video content which is a cut above the typical rough and ready video content normally produced by amateurs who aren't particularly concerned with quality. While LinkedIn has been a relative newcomer in the area of social media video content, it is taking great strides to make up for lost time. Already LinkedIn has seen a tremendous boost in traffic and revenues from video content on its platform, and in recognition of this surging trend, has concentrated much of its effort on developing live streaming video.Last February, beta testing was initiated on LinkedIn Live, and since that time, the feature has officially been rolled out for all LinkedIn Pages. This new feature provides companies with the option for carrying out two-way conversations right on the screen, while at the same time encouraging real-time participation through a comments section which has been dedicated for that purpose.Users who have enabled push notifications, and who routinely engage with platform videos, will also receive an alert at the time a Page goes live. Sometime early in 2020, LinkedIn will be working toward releasing another new feature which it refers to as 'stream targeting', and which makes use of third-party tools such as WireCast and Socialive for the purpose of connecting with people all around the world.

LinkedIn is furthermore intending to introduce private testing capabilities for its Live Stream feature, and this will provide brands with the opportunity to conduct testing and rehearsals before actually going live. According to officials at LinkedIn, those companies and brands which make use of Live Stream have experienced at least seven times more reactions, and have received as much as 24 times more comments, than do ordinary video posts.The dedicated Live Stream website also shares with users some actionable ideas on how to produce content closely aligned with product launchings, or which demonstrate leadership in your industry, or perhaps which feature some of the individuals important to your brand. The whole thought process behind making these capabilities available, is to increase engagement and the interactive nature of LinkedIn posts.

Sharing updates directly

Another initiative undertaken by LinkedIn to help brands connect with their audiences is to simplify the process by which content is shared with those audiences. To this end, the platform has provided a new feature which will permit you to make posts from some of the same areas you have already posted on LinkedIn. This is intended to allow you to promote your brand in a manner which is most effective for you, and which does the best job of reaching your intended audience.Brands will also have the option to share as an individual, if the nature of the content warrants it. The underlying idea behind this new feature is to help sustain conversations without any of the hassles or friction which might normally accompany such interactions. With this and other features, LinkedIn has taken a glimpse into the future, trying to envision new technology and what kind of platform updates might support that new technology. It will be interesting to see how the platform leverages this emerging technology, so as to deliver truly significant experiences to brands, and help them expand their online communities.