LinkedIn Launches Sponsored Updates

In a move to monetize its service, LinkedIn has launched sponsored updates, which are, essentially, the site’s version of a Facebook promoted post. Like promoted posts, LinkedIn company page administrators can pay to have their sponsored updates appear on the homepage feeds of relevant users who do not follow their company already.

Sponsored Updates can appear on desktop, smartphone and tablet devices. They are clearly marked ‘Sponsored’ at the top, the main content is as it would be on a normal post and the normal calls to action – Like, Comment and Share – are joined by a ‘Follow’ button, enabling users to follow the company which posted the content.

David Hahn, Vice President of LinkedIn’s Product Management, announced the new feature in a blog post yesterday, also taking the opportunity to reveal some impressive LinkedIn membership statistics: the social media site for professionals now has over 225 million members, 3 million company pages and 300 notable figures contributing to the Influencer programme.

Hahn believes that the 1.5 publishers whose content is featured on the site will greatly benefit from the new feature, as will the members who post it. Members can target professionals based on the information they have on their profiles, promoting sponsored updates in 20 different languages across the 200 countries where LinkedIn is active.

Marketers are increasingly leveraging content to inform, educate, and inspire their current and prospective customers. But the high quality content they’ve produced – slideshows, articles, videos, and whitepapers – does not always achieve enough reach and engagement on their own channels. With Sponsored Updates, marketers will be able to distribute this content directly to relevant professionals in a place their customers and prospects are already consuming professionally relevant content. Marketers can target Sponsored Updates to any segment of our premium audience based on professional profile data. 

Users can choose to pay by click or by impression, and then they can monitor their sponsored updates using LinkedIn’s analytics software. In the announcement post, Hahn gives a few examples of companies which have successfully used sponsored updates already: Telstra managed to increase the rate at which they gained new followers by 12%, while HubSpot generated “400% more leads coming from their target audience compared to other paid channels”.

The sponsored updates feature is currently only available to customers with an account representative, but it will become available to all companies in the next month.

What do you think of LinkedIn sponsored updates?