LinkedIn has added what I think is the most helpful tool in a long time for businesses to engage with and bring value to their followers: the ability for company pages to publish email newsletters directly through its platform.
Anyone can discover, read, and share your LinkedIn newsletter.
LinkedIn users can also subscribe to it without following your company page or being connected to anyone at your organization.
This underscores the importance of having a company page and how it can be used as a content hub for marketing and recruiting your business.
Linked company page newsletters are available to businesses with more than 150 followers that actively maintain their LinkedIn presences.
All types of LinkedIn company pages can create a newsletter, including showcase pages, product pages and service pages. But if you create a newsletter with a subpage, the newsletter won’t be linked to the parent page.
Here’s how to create a LinkedIn company page newsletter:
- From Super or Content admin view, click “create a newsletter”
- Add a title, description, publishing cadence and logo for your newsletter and click done
- Add content and images (you can even embed YouTube videos right into the newsletter)
- When you click post, your newsletter will also be shared in your news feed (don’t worry, you can edit an article - or delete one - at any time)
- Once you publish your first issue, a page for your newsletter is automatically created with an overview of your newsletter, your page information, and a list of the articles in the newsletter.
You can use your newsletter page to provide a preview of your newsletter and share it on or off LinkedIn to increase your reach. You do not have to be logged in to view the page, but members must log in to subscribe or share it on LinkedIn.
By default, your LinkedIn company page followers will be invited by notification to subscribe to your newsletter once the first article of your newsletter has been successfully published. Subscribing means they’ll receive a notification and email when you publish a new edition of the newsletter.
I recommend that you view the analytics of each newsletter you send and check who has subscribed to it. Within hours of the first edition I sent of my own newsletter, I had thousands of followers. I didn’t have to worry about GDPR rules or gathering emails and building lists. It was all built into LinkedIn. I also found that the number of subscribers increases with each issue you send out, so publish with a regular cadence.
There’s a lot of opportunity here for businesses of all kinds because it is a new feature on LinkedIn for companies (it’s been available to individuals for a short time) and most companies don’t know about it yet (and certainly aren’t using it yet), so being an early adopter is to your benefit.
Even if you send out an email newsletter, you should still utilize the LinkedIn platform to send out a newsletter because you will reach a different audience and cast a wider net for your content.
In addition, people are opting into this newsletter, so it’s not building an audience from scratch, and if you haven’t ever sent out an email newsletter, this is a great way to start. If email marketing programs and CRM management tools overwhelm you, this is a great way to test out the waters.
It’s also really easy to repurpose content you already have. I would include hyperlinks to your website or blog with the full text (in order to keep the newsletter short and to drive traffic to your site).
You can embed links from YouTube into the newsletter to play. Check out my LinkedIn newsletter to see how it looks.
Here are some content ideas for what you can include in your LinkedIn Company Page Newsletter:
- Article snippets with links to your latest blog posts or client alerts
- Links to past webinars (provide a synopsis too)
- Links to recent podcasts and videos (with shownotes)
- Recent case studies
- Q&As with your employees
- Highlights of your community service/pro bono work
- Announcements of your recent hires
- Recent press coverage (this would be the only place where I would recommend including self-promotional items in the newsletter – the rest of it should be client-focused)
- Upcoming events/webinars – this is a great way to promote them
- Open jobs – why not promote them through this newsletter? It’s a competitive job market
- News about your diversity and women’s initiatives programs – clients care a lot about this
Check out this new LinkedIn company page feature and let me know what you think of it. With nearly 800 million people on LinkedIn and the fact that your competitors are very likely not using it yet, it’s at least worth trying out.
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Stefanie Marrone advises law firms of all sizes, professional service firms, B2B companies, recruiters and individuals on the full range of marketing and business development consulting services designed to enhance revenue, retain current clients and achieve greater brand recognition. She also serves as outsourced chief marketing officer/marketing department for small and mid-size law firms. Over her nearly 20-year legal marketing career, she has worked at and with a broad range of big law, mid-size and small firms, which has given her a valuable perspective of the legal industry. Connect with her on LinkedIn, sign up for her email list and follow her latest writing on JD Supra.
