You can boost LinkedIn posts and promote events, marketers

Earlier this week, the folks at LinkedIn announced they were granting users and marketers a few new social media superpowers:

• You can boost organic posts directly from your LinkedIn page (with a small caveat, but we'll get to that shortly). 
• They're also empowering event marketers to do better promoting with a new format called "event ads" – which can be used to advertise virtual events you host on LinkedIn.
• Oh, and as a bonus, you can now choose your live-streaming platform to be whatever you're most comfortable with when using the LinkedIn Live feature of the platform.

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be writing about updates on the LinkedIn platform – let alone caring about them – I would have told you that's about as likely as skorts making a fashion comeback ... but here we are.

🎓 IMPACT+ course: How to get started with LinkedIn B2B advertising

Sigh. Let's accept our fate that LinkedIn isn't so bad and it's actually relevant by diving into each of these three updates individually.

1. You can now boost organic LinkedIn posts

... with an asterisk. Yes, you can now boost organic posts, according to LinkedIn:

Source / LinkedIn

According to their team:

"With the click of a button and a few payment details, you can easily give your most engaging or time-sensitive content a little boost to quickly expand your audience reach. It’s as simple as it sounds, and the newest way to reach a broader audience without having to learn how to use any new marketing tools."

Of course, there is one little catch. You can only boost "any high-performing organic post," not just any ol' post. Meaning you have to already be gaining traction and seeing engagement with the post.

🔎 Related: Are LinkedIn ads really worth the cost for brands?

You can't simply post something and boost it starting from zero, and you won't see the button show up on a post that isn't "high-performing." What are the benchmarks that make a post high-performing? No idea, they didn't say. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

2. LinkedIn rolls out event-ads type

Where are all my virtual event marketers at? This one is for you, and I know you've been waiting for it for some time ... 

That's right, you now have a LinkedIn ad type of your very own: event ads. To be clear, these ads are designed only to boost virtual events you're hosting on the LinkedIn platform.

From LinkedIn: 

"With Event Ads, marketers can ensure that they’re getting in front of the professionals that matter most to them to drive registrations, and event organizers have clear visibility into how many LinkedIn members clicked on or saw an ad and registered for their event — giving them full visibility into the effectiveness of their campaign."

They've also launched an event analytics tool to help you track the performance of your LinkedIn event:

Source / LinkedIn

3. Finally, use the tech you love for LinkedIn Live streaming

If you're an approved LinkedIn Live streamer (yes, you need to be approved), you were pushed toward one of their four preferred partners for streaming:

Now, they've introduced something called "custom streaming," where you can use more common broadcasting tools, such as Zoom and WebEx. This may not seem like a huge update; however, it will likely make the prospect of LinkedIn Live streaming more palatable for those who prefer those platforms.

🔎 Related: Our ultimate guide to online community management for brands

As I mentioned, though, you need to be approved to be a LinkedIn Live streamer. Although they are (unsurprisingly) somewhat vague about this approval process, the LinkedIn team does share the following as considerations for their approval:

• Video and overall content creation history.
• Audience size and engagement history.
• Member or Page account has been in good standing.
• Two Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled in account settings.

Is LinkedIn Live worth your time or your digital marketing strategy focus? That's a question I can't answer, but I can share others are seeing success with the platform:

“It really came as a surprise to our leadership and executives that we could not only get this sheer amount of organic viewers, but they were thoroughly engaged and their view time was longer than we could have expected.”

Marissa Kraines
Director of social and content marketing, Salesforce

Of course, you can only start exploring these new and shiny social avenues if the heart of your digital sales and marketing strategy is sound. No matter what you do or sell, you must obsess over being the No. 1 teacher about what you do in your space. (Seriously, it's that simple – and it works.)

And, no matter what (or where) you're publishing, you must always go to market with a content strategy that targets your ideal buyers' most pressing questions, and then answers those questions as thoroughly and honestly as possible.