For many professionals, LinkedIn is a staple of the digital daily diet. As such, you’ve probably noticed that the popular networking site has received a facelift, at least in its desktop iteration—and some of us might say a much-needed one. Though the cosmetic overhaul is pretty evident, there may be some features or tweaks you haven’t noticed yet. Because LinkedIn is significant both for jobseekers and for marketers, these changes are worth reviewing in some detail.

Changes to the Navigation

Most substantially, LinkedIn’s new desktop site has a tweaked navigation bar, which includes a “home” button (basically a link to your personal feed) plus six additional categories: My Network; Jobs; Messaging; Notifications; Me; and Search. These represent the core capabilities of the site, as LinkedIn sees them.

Additionally, note that there is an option you can click to see “more,” which will take you to some more advanced options, like a Learning section.

Your Home Feed

There’s no need to go through each of these sections, but we will highlight some significant ones, starting with the home feed. According to LinkedIn, the feed will now use a combination of human editors and complex algorithms to highlight the more relevant content in your network, pushing that content into your newsfeed.

LinkedIn’s comments echo those of sites like Facebook, which have long promised to push “relevant” content and to help each user find the information that matters most to them—though how LinkedIn will do this isn’t something they’ve gone into much detail about.

There’s one specific promise that LinkedIn has made, though, that has ramifications for marketers—specifically, that LinkedIn will provide insights into who shares a given piece of content, including company, job title, and location. Certainly, that kind of data will be welcome to those who use LinkedIn to market either themselves or their company.

Messaging on LinkedIn

There have also been some changes made to LinkedIn’s internal messaging system, which now offers real time back-and-forth connections that are, for all intents and purposes, quite similar to Facebook’s Messenger app.

One potentially interesting application of this: Jobseekers who come across promising career opportunities will receive suggestions of people in their network who currently work at the company, facilitating dialog and allowing potential applicants to receive behind-the-scenes information about the company.

This could have ramifications for companies that use LinkedIn as a recruiting tool—namely, it may become important to train employees on how to market the business one-on-one to prospective jobseekers.

Other Changes to LinkedIn

A few more LinkedIn tweaks that are worth mentioning here:

- The platform has promised some big improvements to the accuracy and appearance of search results—though what that means, exactly, remains to be seen.
- LinkedIn is beginning a new endeavor to suggest additions to personal profiles—for example, recommendations of top skills that are in demand within a particular industry.
- Finally, the promise has been made to help users better track trending stories that might be of interest to them. Once again, details are still a little vague here.

Impressions of the New LinkedIn

As for our overall impression of the new LinkedIn desktop site, it’s pretty obvious what they are going for. LinkedIn is trying to provide a more seamless experience between the desktop and app versions, making the overall look and flow of the site familiar no matter what device you access it on. We’d say that they’ve done an admirable job of bringing consistency to the LinkedIn experience, and the changes made to the desktop site are all for the better.

Are there broad implications here for marketers, though? Yes, though the full extent of those implications may take some time to play out. The new LinkedIn site simply hasn’t been around long enough for us to draw conclusions about the new newsfeed algorithms, and we’ll note that LinkedIn ad functionality remains unchanged.

Implications for Marketers

Still, changes to the newsfeed—designed to help users connect to more “relevant” stories—are pending, and that’s telling in and of itself. LinkedIn is probably always going to be a job site, first and foremost, but it’s clear that they also want it to be a platform for content discovery. Marketers shouldn’t ignore the potential here. LinkedIn is an increasingly valuable tool for the same sorts of content marketing endeavors we associate with Facebook and Twitter—publishing and curating information, building brand prestige and authority, displaying thought leadership, and developing trust.

We recommend that marketers consider LinkedIn as part of a broader, integrative marketing approach. You can do so by meeting with the integrated marketing experts here at enCOMPASS; we’d love to discuss your marketing goals with you, and determine where LinkedIn might fit in. Start that conversation today. Reach out to the enCOMPASS team at your convenience!