Do you use LinkedIn’s Competitor Analytics option for Company Pages?
Competitor Analytics, as it sounds, provides more context on how your company page is performing in the app, by showing you data on the follower growth, recent post performance, and engagement rates of competitor LinkedIn company pages.
You can also discover trending content from your competitors’ pages, in order to stay up with engagement shifts.
It’s a handy tool, but unfortunately, it’s about to become a paying member only option.
Up till now, Competitor Analytics has been available for free, but now, non-paying LinkedIn users will only be able to compare their performance against a single competitor.
As you can see in this chart, beginning from October 15th, non-paying company pages will largely lose access to this option.
LinkedIn Premium Company Pages, for which you need to pay at least $99 per month, will have access to comparisons of nine competitor pages, while they’ll also be able to see the trending posts of three competitors.
It’s another way to drive LinkedIn subscription take-up, with LinkedIn looking to build on the growth of its business packages, which it first launched in April last year. Since then, LinkedIn says that Premium Company Pages have become one of its fastest-growing products, with nearly 80% subscriber growth quarter-over-quarter.
I mean, given the relative age of the offering, that’s not a massive surprise. But even so, LinkedIn clearly sees this as another revenue opportunity, so it’s now looking to further limit access to free features, in order to drive businesses to pay up.
That’ll also reduce support costs, by limiting the feature to only paying members. Overall, the update does make sense, but it is worth noting for those who may have used this feature.
Social subscription tools are becoming more advanced, and incorporating more features, which could eventually drive even more platforms to push them as options.
But then again, advertising remains the key revenue driver in each app, and it’s difficult to imagine any of them moving to a subscription-only approach for this reason.
But some features are getting locked away, and if you’re serious about building your business on any specific app, it may be worth considering what’s on offer within its add-on package.
