LinkedIn has been slowly rolling out enhancements to its company pages over the past month or so to its millions of users all over the world, and one of them is something that many administrators of company LinkedIn pages have been asking for a very long time – drum roll please – the ability to manage company pages from a mobile device.
When I realized late Friday night that I can now manage the company LinkedIn pages for which I am an administrator, I almost jumped for joy on a very crowded Manhattan street.
But then I realized that you can’t really manage the page from your mobile device and to do what you really need to do editing wise, you still need to be at a desktop computer.
This was a huge bummer for me, and I’m sure many other marketers who are constantly on the go and want the ability to post from their phones just like we can for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I continue to be surprised that LinkedIn’s platform doesn’t yet enable users to have the full range of tools that you do on its desktop version when you are THE most powerful and important social media platform for business professionals.
Read on to learn what you can and cannot do from your mobile device.
Here’s the thing – you can only manage certain, very limited things on company pages from your mobile device at this point. Basically, all you can do is create a new post.
One very major thing that you cannot do is to edit prior posts.
So the three little dots that appear on every social media post that serve as your gateway to pretty much doing everything do not appear on the front page of the mobile administrator company page. So that severely limits what you can do away from your desk and off hours.
You can delete a post, but it is not easy to do unless you know how to get to that section (I had to play around quite a bit to figure it out and there isn’t much on Google or LinkedIn surprisingly to help you with this), so I really would suggest to LinkedIn that they make that more intuitive for users and easy to find (and post an article or two on best practices and what’s to come).
In order to delete a post from your mobile company page, you need to go to the Activity section, pull up the post, click on it, and then you should see the three small dots that will give you a menu of options, one of which is to “delete post.” Yikes, in my opinion, it should not be this difficult to figure out how to delete a post.
That being said, you now can create new posts, add images and videos (but not other attachments) to a LinkedIn company page from your mobile device. There is a convenient @ sign to make it easy to tag individuals and other entities right in your posts. As you are posting an item, you have the option to either enable comments on the post or disable them (I always think you should enable comments though), and you can change that setting later.
In terms of user engagement, you can view activity and engagement on your LinkedIn company page (to see likes, shares, mentions and comments) from your mobile device. While you can see organic impressions and get some more post analytics (see screen shot), you can’t delve too deep into user analytics on your mobile device or drill down by a specific time period.
From your mobile device, you can view the page as an administrator (the default) or as a member, which can come in handy after you create a post and you want to see how it looks to your audience (just remember though, you won’t be able to tweak it unless you completely delete it).
Perhaps the biggest issue for me with the mobile features though is the fact that you cannot edit a post. So if you create a post and you make a mistake, you have to completely remove it, which is somewhat tricky (and not intuitive) to do and especially for someone who is not comfortable with the mobile interface.
I don’t know about you, but I tink
er with some of my posts quite a bit and not having the ability to make edits to it frightens me almost as much as running into a hungry grizzly bear.
So for now, I’m going to proceed with caution when it comes to posting with reckless abandon on LinkedIn’s mobile platform until it adds features that enable me to edit company pages just like I can from my desktop. Consider me cautiously optimistic about the direction in which we are going. I’ll be looking for those three little buttons each week to appear.
I’ll be writing a lot more about other LinkedIn company page enhancements over the next few weeks – so stay tuned for that but in the meantime, let me know what you think about LinkedIn’s mobile company page enhancements in the comments!