LinkedIn Adds Virtual Events and Polls to Help Replace Live Events

Rich Tehrani

6 years ago

Virtual events are seeing incredible growth as live events have come to a halt thanks the Covid-19 pandemic. While virtual events have proven to replace live conferences in a satisfactory manner, the exhibit hall and networking experiences are still lacking in most of these events.

LinkedIn wants to change this.

Today they launched Virtual Events and a survey tool which is very similar to what Twitter offers. We’ve posted a survey, if you are interested to see how it works.

This is how the survey tool works:

Start a new post and click the “Create a Poll” option in the chooser menu
Type your question, enter up to four answer options, and select the poll’s duration—between 24 hours and up to two weeks
Write up a post to go along with your poll—you can include hashtags to help your poll get more attention
Push the poll live to either your connections, specific Groups you’re in, or to anyone across the LinkedIn network. By targeting specific Groups with your poll, you can get even more relevant insights – for example, if you are in a Group for marketers, you could ask about the group member’s favorite tool for email marketing management.

LinkedIn has a range of solutions for keeping in touch with your community. The company outlined them all in a post today:

LinkedIn Pages: Use your LinkedIn Page to share key messages and updates with your professional community and create a dialogue around the topics that matter most for your organization. For more information on Pages, check out our best practices site and join our LinkedIn Page admin group to stay connected to our product marketing team and broader Page Admin community.
LinkedIn Live: With LinkedIn Live you can host keynote speeches, panels, thought leadership talks, news and announcements through live broadcasts to your networks. If you’re interested in receiving access, let us know here.
LinkedIn Events is in a Beta phase, but we’ve opened it up to ensure that all Pages have a tool to drive awareness of their events. When a Page admin creates an event, they can leverage the LinkedIn network to host a virtual conversation and stay connected to their professional communities. You can also participate in discussions with other attendees by posting and joining conversations in the Event feed.
We’ve also unlocked 16 LinkedIn Learning courses — available for free —with tips on how to build relationships when you’re not face-to-face, and use virtual meeting tools (Microsoft Teams, Skype, BlueJeans, Cisco Webex and Zoom).

To help get you started, we’ve created a Virtual Events Activation Playbook for using LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events for you next digital event.

The company continued by showing all the keynotes which were streamed on its platform:

Microsoft live-streamed CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote at its premier developer conference, Build.

Pegasystems went live from PegaWorld 2019, streaming their CEO’s keynote.

Sessions, Fireside Chats, and Q&As

Workday conducted a #wdaychats on LinkedIn Live, spotlighting healthcare trends.

Emirates NBD hosts their second #SustainabilityNow Talk in partnership with Dubai Police, to discuss the important topic of fraud and how to prevent it.

Thought Leadership

LinkedIn Live is a great way to bring your subject matter expertise to a broad audience.

SoFi live-streamed a Negotiating 101 event with a discussion lead by a resident negotiation expert.

GIBS Business School went live from their campus in Johannesburg with Coca-Cola to discuss “Building a Total Beverage Company.”

The company went on to explain product launches can be facilitated by its platform as well: