LinkedIn Adds Trending Content List And A Score For Companies’ Content Marketing Efforts

LinkedIn is introducing some new tools for businesses hoping to attract a following with their LinkedIn content.

First up, there’s a content marketing score, which measures the total effectiveness of a businesses’ LinkedIn content. It’s calculated by taking the total number of unique LinkedIn members who engaged with a company’s Sponsored Updates, Company Pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates, and Influencer posts, then divides that by the total audience of active LinkedIn users that you’d like to reach. In other words, it tells you what fraction of your target audience you’re actually reaching.

Is it basically a Klout score for LinkedIn? (That would be particularly amusing since Klout has reportedly been acquired by Lithium Technologies for $200 million.) Well, there are some parallels, but some key differences, too. For one thing, it’s only scoring companies, not individuals. For another, while you get to see how your score stacks up against your competitors, the rankings are anonymized, and the score itself is private for each company.

Valter Sciarrillo, the head of measurement for the marketing solutions organization at LinkedIn, wrote in a company blog post:

By tracking performance on a monthly basis, you get a powerful snapshot on how well you are engaging with your audience over time. With this knowledge, you’ll be empowered to upgrade your strategy to optimize engagement within your target.

Businesses will be able to filter their scores based on region, industry, and more. Plus, LinkedIn will be offering recommendations on how the score can be improved.

That brings us to the second announcement. One aspect of content marketing is knowing what to talk about, so to help with that, LinkedIn says it will be providing a list of topics that are popular with your target audience. It’s not exactly a new idea to identify trending topics on a social network, but in LinkedIn’s case, it sounds like this is more of a tool for marketers than a consumer feature.

Earlier this month, I wrote about Citi, which has had one of the content marketing success stories on LinkedIn. The goal of tools like this is to create more success stories — and presumably to get companies to invest more in their content efforts on LinkedIn.