A new phase of community management – beginning with a new API

B2B marketers come to LinkedIn because they want to reach and authentically engage with a professional audience. As they cultivate deep connections with members, they’re able to provide value beyond their products, creating something customers and prospects want to be a part of — community. We’ve long recognized that our partners play a crucial role in assisting marketers to manage their LinkedIn Pages in an efficient and scalable manner. This is why our Page Management APIs have been among the core offerings of our LinkedIn Marketing APIs. 

As our platform evolves, we realize that B2B marketers must go beyond consistent Page activity if they’re to maintain an influential presence in the world’s professional community. Now, they need, among other things, an understanding of conversations happening across the platform, insights on perceptions of their brand, and more direct avenues for customer care. With this in mind, we’re increasing our focus on community management, beginning with the launch of a new Community Management API, so you can continue to enhance your product offerings and help marketers to meet their objectives.

Why community management matters

According to research done by the LinkedIn B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, lack of brand awareness is a bigger barrier to acquisition than non-customer brand rejection. A B2B brand’s growth is therefore closely tied to its ability to gain notice and stay top of mind for  prospective customers. Community management — cultivating a relevant and engaging organic presence in the channels where a brand’s target audience spends their time – is a highly effective mechanism to make this happen.

We recognize that this extends beyond LinkedIn, and partner products are vital to marketers maintaining appropriate oversight of their activities across platforms, and building a holistic understanding of their audiences’ interactions in different settings. Our goal is to make it easier for you to seamlessly augment the native LinkedIn experience, to amplify the value marketers derive from the platform. 

Where we will focus

Synthesizing partner and customer feedback, and our own assessment of where the greatest opportunities for impact lie, we’ve taken up the following priorities:

Consistency

In the last year, we’ve dedicated a significant amount of focus to ensuring that essential features that bolster the marketer’s LinkedIn efforts are available via API. These include capabilities like brands @mentioning members in article, image and video posts, editing page comments, creating posts in a variety of formats including polls and multi-image posts, and uploading captions and custom thumbnails for videos. 

We will continue to prioritize features that prevent a disjointed experience for marketers using partner products.

Intelligence

We want to enable partners to better equip customers with the insights they need to understand how their organic marketing activities are being received, and to enhance their communication with the LinkedIn community.

Dialogue

We will also be prioritizing features and insights that make it easier for customers to efficiently engage in brand-relevant conversations, as well as those that enable more direct dialogue between brands and their community members. 

What this means for you

Starting today, all partners can request access to the new Community Management API. This will position you to take advantage of new features, as they become available, building on the robust community management solutions already at hand. You can find all the details on access requirements and the vetting process for the new API in the Getting Started section of our developer documentation.  

If you have any  questions, please make an inquiry via a Zendesk ticket or the LinkedIn Marketing Developer Group.

We’re excited about the immense value you’ll be able to create for marketers, as we expand the capabilities of the new API.