LinkedIn Elevate opens to the enterprise, gets audience reach analytics

In the age of social media, companies turn to employees as brand ambassadors. These are the people who add credibility to any company in terms of expertise and thought leadership. It’s because of this that LinkedIn launched its Elevate service earlier this year, and five months later, the service is now available to large enterprises (those with more than 2,000 employees).

Not only will more people have access to this service, but it now comes with better analytics. Previously available to beta testers, Elevate allows users to track their audience demographics in order to better understand who’s engaging with their content.

LinkedIn Elevate’s product manager, Will Sun, told VentureBeat that LinkedIn has always known that people love to share information with their network, that “companies want to illustrate what they stand for” and that what employees do helps companies with their business objectives.

“Employees embody the same narrative, which transforms the companies they work for,” Sun said. “That’s why Elevate shows employees how sharing is helping strengthen their professional brand…if employees don’t see how they benefit from sharing content, their engagement will wane.”

Sun said that when a LinkedIn user shares six pieces of content, on average they’ll receive six profile views and make two new connections, something that he believes proves the value of promoting employee advocacy. Another statistic he shared is that only 2 percent of employees are sharing content that a company has posted on LinkedIn, however, that 2 percent is responsible for 20 percent of the overall engagement the content receives.

Until now, Elevate hadn’t been available to large enterprise companies, but it definitely seems to be a good fit. Sun said that firms of this size are clamoring for this capability and are eager to share their content with employees. In doing so, the expectations are that these company advocates will go out and help spread the word about the things they’re doing, to not only show how amazing the firm is, but also to demonstrate they’re on top of industry news, events, and issues.

The audience demographics tracks things such as audience reach by industry, profession, and companies, along with identifying the top sharers of someone’s content, the main broadcasters, and more. It’s more than who’s clicking through, liking, and commenting — rather it’s about gaining insights into who is actually being influenced. Is your vice president of engineering’s social activity really reaching her counterparts or higher-ups, or is it just resonating better with the team members? You might not know until you look at Elevate’s analytics.

To help you better understand your audience, notifications have been upgraded. Elevate users will now be notified when certain shares are performing really well. Sun said that the intent is to highlight engagement by people that matter to you. He added that these pings are designed to let you know when that happens and can help you build your personal brand.

LinkedIn Elevate was introduced in April and has let people share content on not only its own network but also on Twitter. Today, the company has finally added integration support for Facebook, so now all three major social networks can be accessed.

“Helping employees stand out is something that LinkedIn’s Elevate wants to do,” Sun told us.