LinkedIn’s New Company Page Gets Even Better
Have you accessed the new LinkedIn company page? The new design started deployment several months ago and most of the company pages I administer have now been converted. LinkedIn has been kind enough to retain access to the old administration page but states that once all company pages have been migrated, the old admin experience will be retired. So if you’ve been avoiding the upgrade, it’s a good idea to get familiar with the new admin dashboard. To make it easier LinkedIn has made updates in the last week to eliminate two primary frustrations.
The new layout is cleaner and offers some useful administrative tools. That said whenever I hear that an interface is going to be “cleaner”, I immediately try to identify what they’ve removed and how that might affect me.
The better news is that the two frustrations I had with the new admin dashboard have just been updated to improve the experience.
Embedded Images
Clearly LinkedIn is trying to make the new company pages more scanable and is relying on images to keep the content from getting cluttered. To do that it pulls the featured image from a page. As long as you’ve set that image, LinkedIn seamlessly embeds it into the post.
But what if the page you are linking to does not have a defined image or has misassigned one? Before the update I found it frustrating because LinkedIn used that wrong image or created a basic title text post which doesn’t exactly draw attention when placed in a sea of graphics.
The most recent update corrected the deficiency by reinstating the simple add image icon and making the title editable. It’s still most efficient to have a defined image but if you are linking to a page that you don’t have administrative access to or need to make customized changes within LinkedIn, it’s an option again.
Sharing from Your Profile
LinkedIn does not currently let you sort your feed. The content defaults to “featured content” so finding a particular post can be a frustrating experience. LinkedIn says that sorting your feed by date posted will be returning soon but, for now, sharing company news to personal accounts can be a headache.
While I’ve not seen research to prove this, the new update seems to share news from a particular company. That company’s posts then become more prevalent in my feed for additional sharing. A good workaround is to alert anyone that might want to share your company news that they should do so when it’s featured on their feed and not delay. This typically happens soon after the content is posted on the company page. After a few shares it becomes easier for individuals to find the company posts.
The added benefit to a group sharing company news as soon as it’s available is that once one user shares the content, other users can locate that share in the first users profile and share the share. This prevents multiple people from having to hunt down a post to share it. Once one user shares it, the other users can navigate directly to the content via that share.
Avoiding these couple frustrations has let me appreciate the scanability of the new company pages and the addition of several useful tools.