What is Linkedin? Linkedin is a global business-oriented social networking that allows you to exchange information, ideas, opportunities and so many more. It is a professional network that connects billions of members from all around the world using LinkedIn. Linkedin is an excellent and effective social media management tool that not just helps businesses to easily connect with existing ones but also get potential business partners, clients, employees, and so on. Linkedin provides comprehensive social media management features to grow and engage your business.
Features of Linkedin
- Manage All Your Channels in a Clear InterfaceAll your channels and social media platforms in a single tool: Swat.io brings everything together in one place and lets you use workspaces to divide up various areas. The dashboard gives you an overview of all your channels, and lets you plan content, respond to inquiries from your fans and followers, and analyze and evaluate your channels’ performance.
- Agile Editorial Planning for All ChannelsUse Swat.io Publisher to plan content for all your communication channels in a clear, agile calendar. Swat.io enables you to schedule and publish content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest. Content planning channels for Snapchat, Tumblr, Vimeo, Xing, newsletters and all your other channels help you coordinate your communication centrally.
- Internal and External Collaboration on Planning and Community ManagementUse the internal notes feature to coordinate proposed social media posts with your colleagues. Collect ideas collaboratively or approve posts. Questions to colleagues or external specialists are displayed clearly in the activity log, ensuring you can maintain an overview at all times and respond quickly to unanswered questions.
- Set Remits With Sophisticated Role ManagementTeam members are only given access to the areas approved for their role and authorizations, so you can ensure your channels’ information and content can only be viewed by authorized users.
- LinkedIn Community Management With a Central InboxBring together all the messages from all your social media channels in a single inbox. Swat.io Inbox enables you to reply quickly and efficiently assign tickets to the team members responsible. Track every conversation from end to end, and receive email notifications and ongoing updates.
- Analyze and Evaluate Your Social Media PerformanceCheck out the key performance indicators for your social media channels and get a quick overview of the most important information about your community, content, custom tags, tickets and team members. You can use this information to measure and evaluate the success of your social media strategy.
Canva
Canva is the go-to online graphic design app for millions of Linkedin users. It’s easy to see why.
Canva offers simple LinkedIn post graphics that you can customize to increase engagement on your next LinkedIn post. You can use Canva for free to edit these LinkedIn post graphics as well as additional templates that can be modified for use on LinkedIn.
Canva offers premium features and paid images, but there are enough free design elements to keep your social media content fresh.
To ensure you have the most unique images in your industry, replace the stock images supplied by Canva with another stock image source. HubSpot recommends these 20 free sites to start with, which will keep your costs down.
Snappa
Snappa markets itself as “everything you can ask for from a graphic design tool”. It offers a drag-and-drop graphic design editor similar to Canva’s and includes some cool effect filters too.
Snappa also offers a massive library of royalty-free visual assets (3m+ photos, 100k+ graphics, 200+ fonts) and thousands of ready-to-go templates to make the design process for your Linkedin graphics quick and painless.
The re-size functionality is especially convenient when you want to take an image you created for Pinterest or Instagram and resize it for Linkedin. The software takes care of rearranging the image elements to make the result look good with any image dimensions.
Snappa also lets you upload and store your own visual assets and organize your favorite templates into folders. If you have a team, you can add them to collaborate on image creation.
There’s a free plan with a significant feature set. But if you want to add social sharing, font uploads, or team collaboration, you’ll need to pay $10 or $20 per month (billed annually).
Feedly
Feedly shot to prominence almost a decade ago when Google shut down its RSS reader. But it has improved its service dramatically since then.
The idea is that you can organize all your blog feeds into collections and then click on those collections to get the latest and greatest posts, without having to visit each feed or blog one by one.
It does require a bit of work to get your feeds loaded and organized, but Feedly makes it easy to follow topics as well as public collections.
Once you get your Feedly app revved up and working well, it will become a neverending source of content for your Linkedin followers. And the price is low enough to make it a no-brainer for any professional.
Currently, its plans are $6, $8, or $18 per month.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo has been the go-to content research and discovery engine for many years now. It set the standard for power and depth when it launched and has gotten more and more powerful every year.
You can search by topic, find what’s trending, and even see what’s resonating on social networks like Linkedin.
If you can afford the $99/mo introductory price, this platform is definitely worth the investment.
ContentStudio
ContentStudio is a social media management platform that offers content discovery and content curation in addition to publishing and analytics for marketers.
They also have recipes – a highly customizable set of automated publishing features for your social networks.
You can use recipes to set up automated posts from specific RSS feeds and specify the content that get published to your social networks by keyword, post length, age, and other targeted filters. It’s a great way to use big publishers as news sources without sharing 20+ articles an hour with your audience.
ContentStudio paid plans to start at $49 per month. This includes 10 automation campaigns.
Hootsuite
The main problem with the main service from Buffer is that you can only post updates with it. You cannot conduct other management activities like responding to comments and liking. With this, you need a separate tool like Hootsuite. Although, from 2019, you may want to check out Buffer’s Respond product.
Hootsuite has a feature called streams which show different parts of your Linkedin feeds in one place. For example, you can create a stream for your home page and your updates and place them side by side. The home page stream will show you updates from your connections and your updates stream will show things you have posted.
As you can view all updates in one place it will save you a lot of time. You can interact with these updates by leaving comments and liking them.
Hootsuite also lets you schedule updates, but the interface is not as easy to use as Buffer. This is why it is nice to combine the two and use Buffer for posting and Hootsuite for other tasks.
You can add both your Linkedin page and profile to your Hootsuite account with the free plan as it lets you connect up to 3 accounts. But the features are very limited. If you want more features you will need to get the pro plan which costs $14.99 per month.
Pricing plans
- Starting price per user: $45/month or $348 per year (the equivalent of $29 per month if paying annually)
- Top plan: Enterprise custom pricing plan
- Free Trial Available: Yes, free plan available
Oktopost
If you prefer using just one tool for all your Linkedin activities, instead of switching between two, Oktopost is the perfect solution for you. It has a great user interface and you will be able to easily schedule updates with it and interact with updates from others. They also simplify the process of posting to groups.
Oktopost also has some advanced Linkedin management features that other social media management tools don’t.
One of these is group search which lets you search and find relevant groups. You can also post to these groups using multiple profiles (profiles of your employees in the company for example).
They even have a tag feature that lets you, tag groups. Therefore when posting an update you just have to mention a tag and your update will be shared in all the groups tagged with that keyword. No need to type in relevant groups each and every time.
Their social inbox makes it easy to respond to comments. Oktopost provides detailed analytics on your updates so that you can determine which updates and groups are bringing you the best results.
Pricing for Oktopost is only available by contacting them. You need to set up a demo and tell them all your requirements. They will then recommend a package for you.
Pricing plans
- Starting price per user: $200/month when pricing was displayed publicly. Contact them to learn current pricing options.
- Top plan: Available on contact
- Free Trial Available: No
Quintly
To create a strong social media strategy for any social network, you need a robust analytics tool. You can use it to audit your Linkedin accounts and the accounts of your competitors. This will form the basis of your strategy.
One tool that can help you conduct a good audit is Quintly. You can use it to track follower growth, post engagement, and many more things in great detail. You can use it to analyze both your presence and the presence of your competitors.
The data is displayed in the form of graphs. This makes it easy to compare your presence against your competitors. You can also use it to analyze your other social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and more. Therefore, you can easily compare your presence on all these networks to see which one is getting you the best results.
To access Linkedin analytics, you will need to sign up for their ‘Small’ plan. This costs $129 per month. They have got more packages, their main benefits are that you can add more pages and dashboards.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a professional social media network, primarily used for job searching/networking and maintaining professional relationships. You can add business partners, friends, customers, coworkers and other contacts from your network of connections to your connections, referred to as a ‘network.’ You can establish professional relationships with others so that you can be aware of their news and updates—and they may do the same with you. You can also join groups that are centered around an interest or topic and exchange information and ideas with people in these groups.