Today we are excited to announce the expansion of Q4’s social media management to include LinkedIn Company Pages. This major addition builds on the broad capabilities of the Q4 platform in helping public companies manage their social media outreach.
A little background on why LinkedIn has become important:
Over the last year or so, we have seen a marked increase in the amount of referral traffic coming from LinkedIn Company Pages to our network of client websites. In fact, in many cases LinkedIn has emerged to become the dominant social media channel for referral traffic, even more than all other channels combined.
In addition to being a main source of referral traffic to our client’s sites, many of our clients have also started to see a significant spike in followers to their LinkedIn Company Page ranging across all types of stakeholders. In many cases, companies have 10′s of thousands of followers on LinkedIn that include investors, employees and peers to name a few.
Based on the above, we wanted to make it easier for our clients to provide content to their Company Pages and to enhance the experience for their followers on LinkedIn. We also wanted to take the great content being published to these pages and bring it back to our client websites. Today’s release achieves both of these goals. We highlight the features next:
LinkedIn API Integration
The Q4 platform is now integrated with the LinkedIn API, which gives any Q4 client and authenticated user the ability to publish content to their LinkedIn Company Page, through the Q4 Web social media dashboard. This feature makes it easy to share any recently published item such as a press release, presentation or third party blog post. Content can be published on an ad-hoc basis or as part of Q4’s social media alerting service.
OAuth Secure Authentication
Security is a major priority at all times here at Q4. As such, when connecting the Q4 platform to LinkedIn we use a secure OAuth method. This approach is best because Q4 does not store the password for LinkedIn, while a secure connection is made.
Content Previews
When content is published from Q4 to LinkedIn Company Pages, LinkedIn can pick up the title, photo and summary text for the update. This ensures that your updates will always look great to your followers on LinkedIn. See example below, with a comment provided, link, preview image along with the title of the article and summary text:
Configuration Options
Social Media Dashboard – LinkedIn joins, Facebook, Twitter, Stocktwits, SlideShare and Google as supported API partners on our social media dashboard. As part of the Q4 social media dashboard, LinkedIn Company Page integration can be configured in a number of different ways to suit how clients prefer to use social media as part of their communications plans.
Ad-hoc updates – Put simply this is a status box in Q4 social where anything including text, links, photos and videos can be shared and published to LinkedIn Company Pages.
Recent Published Items – The last 10 things published through your site can quickly and easily be shared to your LinkedIn Company Page. By simply clicking on the send icon beside the items title, the status box is pre-filled with the item’s title, weblink and anything else configured using the social media templates (more on these below).
Social Media Alerts – An extension of the Q4 alerting system, LinkedIn Company Pages can now be automatically updated each time a new Press Release, Event, Presentation, Financial Report or SEC Filing is added to the IR website. Even if the content is updated through a data feed, such as a press release or SEC filing, it can be immediately published to the Company Page. The structure of these alerts are fully customizable through our social media templates.
Social Media Templates – A configuration setting for recently published items and social alerts, the templates allow administrators to customize Linkedin Company Page updates for 5 different content types: press releases, events, presentations, reports and pages. For each template, clients can customize the language and structure of the update, including adding specific #hashtags and $cashtags to each type of update.
Social Archiving
A component of our proprietary web disclosure records technology, all LinkedIn Company Page updates published through Q4 are recorded and stored in an archive. If required, every item published is accessible for detailed analysis.
Website Integration
With this release we also support the integration of LinkedIn Company Page updates into corporate and investor websites and newsrooms. This is an extension of our social stream product which allows for unlimited flexibility in integrating real-time social media and interactivity into website pages. Now, each time an update is published on your LinkedIn Company Page, it can also display on your website. This is a great feature for showcasing your activity on social networks, while keeping your visitors on your site.
LinkedIn Company Pages will be rolling out on the Q4 platform soon. Keep an eye out on your Q4 dashboard for the announcement. We look forward to seeing all the great content clients will be publishing on LinkedIn over the coming months.