Dive Brief:

• LinkedIn and DataSift announced a strategic partnership via a DataSift press release for a new LinkedIn Engagement Insights metrics product.
• The analytics will provide marketers with insights on interests, engagement with content and brand interaction relating to LinkedIn’s 467 million users.
• "Being able to make data-driven decisions is vital for us to increase the reach and success of our clients’ campaigns on LinkedIn. So, we were very interested in getting more data from LinkedIn, an extremely valuable and solid source of information for advertisers," Eleonore Laubier, Business Integration Lead at Publicis Media, stated in the press release. "We started using LinkedIn Engagement Insights with UBS, one of our biggest global clients, and were so impressed by the results that we’ve started integrating it into our Connected Intelligence tool for all of our clients.”

Dive Insight:

For LinkedIn, the deal shows that the company is getting more serious about advertising and is offering data to encourage marketers to be more active on the platform. For example, marketers will now be able to build reports featuring aggregated data about the users, content and companies on LinkedIn. Private member data will not be collected or viewed. 

LinkedIn has long offered a range of targeting for marketers advertising on the platform via its internal InMail system or other ad formats, but marketers should welcome a third-party tool that provides more engagement metrics such as what type of content resonates with different people and how LinkedIn users are engaging with brands.

Microsoft bought LinkedIn somewhat unexpectedly last June for a little more than $26 billion, and at the time there was industry speculation that deal would bring an entirely new level of targeting on LinkedIn given the possibility that user data could be combined with Microsoft customer data. The expectation was also that the social media platform might become more integrated into Microsoft’s core suite of enterprise solutions. Now, more than seven months later, LinkedIn apparently remains its own entity under the Microsoft umbrella so the DataSift news is encouraging for LinkedIn marketers looking for new tools to improve their efforts.