LinkedIn is a fantastic business tool treasured by professional businessmen and women across the globe, including digital marketing consultants like myself. 

It allows us to connect and build relationships with other like-minded individuals, gain leads, and also grants us the opportunity to share our thoughts and opinions freely. Freedom of speech is truly welcomed across the LinkedIn platform. 

And it’s about to get better, with the team behind it recently announcing some exciting changes to come in 2023 as a part of their annual preview. The seven upcoming changes include; video accessibility, updates to their job search, post-scheduling, and content analytics. 

Keep reading to learn more about the new features expected to be added across the year. 

Improved Video Accessibility for Users

Linkedin will grant automatically generated captions for the videos you upload to the platform (a feature currently only available in English). You can opt to either add or edit these captions before publishing the video to your feed.

You can also now activate high contrast mode on the Linkedin app to enhance user accessibility for those with visual impairments or low vision.

The Introduction of Standardized Accessibility Job Titles

If you work within a field of accessibility, you can now pick from a list of standardized job titles, including; “accessibility designer”, “accessibility engineer”, etc. This allows you to be more easily discovered and helps to find opportunities matching your skills.

An Alt Text Functionality in Campaign Manager

The LinkedIn Campaign Manager now allows advertisers to add alternative or alt-text text descriptions to the images featured in their ad campaigns. This grants visually impaired or blind users to understand the images being displayed to them. 

Updates To LinkedIn Job Search

The task of job hunting has undergone a huge transformation in recent years. Even if you are not actively searching for a new role, many professionals in the app are still interested in learning more about and pursuing new career opportunities.

LinkedIn has highlighted that more people are casually looking into new job roles better suited to their interests and values, for example; upskilling, improving their work-life balance, and their professional progression.

To assist casual job hunters, LinkedIn is currently testing personalized job collections that users can discover without carrying out a manual job search.

At the moment, these personalized job collections are being tested in the United States with a selected number of businesses, but a “rapid expansion” is being planned, states the company.

B2B Product Search Updates

As part of a recent update, LinkedIn launched Product Pages. This useful feature is designed to help LinkedIn members explore products that meet their needs or connect with community experts, and if interested, they will make a purchase. 

The app currently features almost 90,000 B2B products, and users can easily access them via LinkedIn search. LinkedIn plans to introduce new category filters and improve the relevance of the Product Pages granting a more personalized experience. I see a nod to Instagram shopping here. 

Usually, professionals have to go through a long slog process to obtain the right information when making purchase decisions for their business, including researching products, looking into price comparisons, seeking customer feedback, and contacting sales representatives. Product Pages aims to take away the stress of the situation, whilst allowing professionals to make better purchase decisions. 

Post Scheduling

At last, one of the most demanded LinkedIn features is to be welcomed – the ability to schedule and plan your postings.

When inside the platform, a “schedule” icon will appear next to the “Post” button when creating a post for your feed. You then want to click on the icon to schedule your post, followed by selecting the day and time you want to share your content. You also have complete control over your control and can edit as you go ahead of time.

Updates To Content Analytics

LinkedIn understands the importance of being able to access the data that allows you to increase your audience and gauge the effectiveness of the content you are producing. 

Therefore, they are updating the LinkedIn creator analytics dashboard to include audience data and your top-performing content. This grants you the ability to examine the expansion of your audience and learn more about your audience’s demographics.

You can also use this to spot engagement patterns and manage analytics in a way that suits you, due to the new data exporting feature within the dashboard. However, you must activate creator mode to access these new features.