LinkedIn Elevate : Employees Become Brand Ambassadors

 LinkedIn has announced a new product called “LinkedIn Elevate” which helps employees share their company’s content easily on LinkedIn and Twitter. The new desktop and mobile app (on iOS and Android) will be available by Q3 2015. The new tool’s objective is not only to make content easier to share, but to also measure the impact of social engagement for companies. Elevate will enable employees to schedule information to better target their messages and to send them at the best time, such as out of office hours.

According to LinkedIn, “Socially engaged companies are 57% more likely to get increased sales leads, 58% more likely to attract top talent, and 20% more likely to retain them.” click here to read more about Elevate.

A LinkedIn study shows that only 2% of employees share their company’s content on LinkedIn, which is a serious loss for businesses, especially when an employee has more connections than their company page has followers! The role of an employee on LinkedIn is key, according to Will Sun, Product Manager at LinkedIn, "employees generate 20% of the overall engagement on the company’s page consisting of clicks, likes, comments and shares".

According to the same study, when an employee shares six articles from their company to their network, they receive, on average, six more views to their profile and two new LinkedIn connections. In addition the company LinkedIn page will receive six job offer views, three page views and one new follow. This virtuous circle helps both companies and employees to better market themselves, target the correct audience and attract new talent.

According to Will Sun, employees “lack the tools needed to easily and effectively curate content, suggest it to the right employees, and measure the impact on the bottom line”. This is why LinkedIn have decided to introduce Elevate.

Quintiles, Adobe and Unilever participated in the Elevate pilot back in Q1 of 2015. Employees who participated in the pilot shared six times more often than in the months leading up to the pilot. As a result, Quintiles’ employees who participated received four times more profile views and made two times more connections. Unilever also yielded interesting results as employees drove four times more company page views, two times more company page followers, and six times more job views, according to this study.

LinkedIn Elevate’s dashboard will also show accurate results on shared content. Results will show likes, shares, comments, how many people were reached and soon, profile views and contact requests. LinkedIn expect this level of data will assist companies in tracking conversions, such as leads, hires and sales via the new app.

To conclude, using LinkedIn Elevate will help spread the word and reach all your target audience through a company’s most vital resource; its employees. At the same time, this new tool goes hand in hand with a business’ communication strategy and can help the company achieve its goals, both internally and externally.

At the moment, company information can only be shared on LinkedIn and Twitter, LinkedIn Elevate is currently only available by registering your interest using the following link https://business.linkedin.com/elevate.