LinkedIn added an Audience Engagement category to the LinkedIn Partner Program with the aim of helping brands on the professional network with reaching and engaging the most appropriate audiences for their campaigns.
The initial Audience Engagement partners are Amobee, Annalect, Hootsuite, Ogilvy and Sprinklr.
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions senior product manager Amita Paul said in a blog post that those partners integrated the LinkedIn Audience Engagement API (application-programming interface) “to create offerings that enable customers and clients to discover new audiences, better understand the types of content those audiences are engaging with and see how your content is performing against industry benchmarks.”
She added that in order to protect its members’ privacy, only aggregated insights that do not identify them are provided, and access to the API is limited to “a small subset of partners.”
Paul also outlined three key benefits of the initiative for brands:
- Audience discovery: LinkedIn has over 645 million members, and Paul said that while choosing who to engage with can seem like a daunting task, “Our integration partners enable you to discover new audiences who have high engagement with topics and articles related to your industry.”
- Content recommendations: Advertisers can easily discover the trending topics and content that their key audiences are engaging with, helping to inform their content-marketing strategies.
- Industry benchmarking: Marketers can get a handle on the types of content their competitors are posting and how engagement compares.
LinkedIn has been testing its audience engagement features over the past few months, and two partners in the test group commented in the blog post.
Hootsuite vice president of alliances Stefan Krepiakevich said, “The added capabilities will enable Hootsuite Impact customers to discover new audiences to improve campaign targeting while increasing organic and paid performance on LinkedIn.”
And Amobee senior vp of social sales and partnerships Johnny Horgan added, “We’re excited to blend LinkedIn insights with Amobee’s Brand Intelligence solution to give a new perspective into professional content and engagement trends. This unique collaboration allows Amobee to paint a more holistic picture for clients and provide them with expanded layers of insight that guide their marketing strategies.”
